One day last summer I went for a late-afternoon drive with my parents into Rocky Mountain National Park. From the safety of the rental car, we drove into a hailstorm, then into a parking lot to wait out the hailstorm–which stopped, so my dad pulled back onto the road, and it immediately started again, and […]
Helen
The campus of the National Institutes of Health is in Bethesda, Md. In the 1930s, the kernel of today’s NIH was part of “Tree Tops,” the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Luke I. Wilson. It has lots of lovely old brick buildings and squeezed-in bits of lawn. Lots of nice big trees, too. One day […]
Dear Persimmons, Where have you been all my life? On trees, I suppose. I think you’re even on a tree in a front yard a few blocks away from here, which on the way to the gym and the grocery store–a street which, come to think of it, I’ve been using for most of my […]
This post originally ran in June 2018. (I still have the sunglasses.) I’ve been telling myself for a couple of years now that, when my sunglasses turned 20, they were getting their own blog post. Well, that’s sometime around now–my records aren’t too good, but it was definitely 1998 and almost definitely June–so here you […]
When the National Museum of Natural History, here in D.C., was planning to demolish their fossil hall and build a new one, they knew they would have to deal with something big: Six huge murals. They’re classics, painted between 1960 and 1974, showing wild assemblages of animals from different points in our planet’s history. The […]
I’ve always been bad at bird songs. My neighbor corrected me on this on Sunday, as we were walking down the alley behind my building, so here’s a more accurate statement: I’ve never put in the work that is required to be really good at bird songs. To really learn bird songs, I think you […]
Recently I’ve been noticing the milkweed pods, doing their thing, so I thought today would be a good day to revisit these old pictures of my favorite local patch of milkweed. Originally published Nov 21, 2014. About halfway between my apartment and my office is a community garden. In a corner of that community garden […]
I have a bit of a t-shirt problem. I love the graphics. I like how someone at the gym will say, “Hey, I was at that concert, too! Wasn’t it great?” I love wearing something that represents my neighborhood when I’m traveling far away. I love how, every time I take a t-shirt out of […]