To be fair, the blue jay did warn me. I was walking across a green space near my apartment building, bounded by streets and a transit station and criss-crossed by concrete paths and surrounded by roads. A recent mow–the first in months–had left it looking like a hay field. A hay field with a lot […]
Helen
A big black bird was perched up on the corner of a house, one of the nice, big old houses in my neighborhood. “Nice,” “big,” and “old” is about as precise as I can get on architecture. But I can nail down that bird. It was an American crow. It called, a single caw! Its […]
May 20, 2020, is our anniversary, and we celebrated by writing postcards to ourselves in May 20, 2010. Today, Craig, Emily, and Helen reassure their 10-years-younger selves. And Sally…I wouldn’t call it reassuring exactly? Craig Childs You don’t want to know. You’d overthink it and plan inappropriately. Let it come. You’re getting back from the […]
I’ve lived in my apartment for more than 12 years. In early April, I realized for the first time that there are wisteria in the back parking lot. I suppose this is because I only caught onto wisteria, as an event, in April of 2019. I was in Kumamoto Prefecture in southwestern Japan. A friend […]
From my apartment most of the view is a small parking lot, a few stories below me, lined by vines and a few weedy trees. The last few weeks, a mockingbird has been loudly claiming this as his territory. On and on and on, a few phrases of a song he’s learned, then to the […]
On March 1st, I got concerned enough to start asking a few beloved elders if they had two weeks of supplies. (They did.) The next day, I stopped touching my face. Last week, I stopped going to restaurants. Monday, when I left the office for my two regular work-from-home days, I thought I might not […]
Wednesday night, Washington, D.C.: Because my work life is slightly on fire right now, and because I already spent 10 hours of this day either sitting in front of my computer or walking around in circles talking to people on the phone, I present to you a photograph of a sunrise in the Caribbean last […]
Two weeks ago, I wrote about practicing underwater photography on the junk at the bottom of the public pool – band-aids, mostly – and my hope that I would find something better to photograph in Belize. Good news: I did. I saw a ton of lovely fish, some sea turtles, and a lot of really […]