I’ve said it before and I will say it again: There is a bug that is the best bug, and it is the cicada. We’ve just come out of August, the time of the dog-day cicadas – the ones that come out every year. This one was greeted me on my stoop the other day, […]
Nature
This post came out a few years ago exploring anxiety and big, wild cats. At that point, there had been no deaths this century from mountain lions in Colorado where I live. New Year’s Day this year that statistic changed when a woman was attacked while alone on a hiking trail not far from the […]
Not everything can be awful, right? Not everything can be the worst. Anyway, I have just decided that I refuse to let everything be the worst and to succumb to the idea that no, it is, in fact, the worst. I feel a bit guilty about trying to grasp joy, but what choice does any […]
You want travel to change you. Right? But then you come back home, and it’s back to your regular life, and the smells and sounds and memories and surprises drift away, and there you are, back the way you were. This spring, I spent nearly two months on a pilgrimage, visiting 88 temples on the […]
More snow finally came on Tuesday night, two months later than it was supposed to finally come, and it is too late, but it is better than nothing. That’s what everyone is saying. “I’m so grateful for the moisture.” “I hope the flowers I covered will make it.” “I’m happy it snowed, but I do […]
See those little round plants? The flat ones? They’re ferns. Ferns! Did you even know ferns came like that? Not a frond in sight? Little flat discs? Well, they do! They grow in many, many wet places in Japan, often among the wee mosses and lichens, which means I’d seen them for a long time […]
My family spent this spring break in Costa Rica. We went, of course, for the wildlife. Unfortunately, so did everyone else. Manuel Antonio National Park, on the Pacific coast, is one of the prime spots for seeing biodiversity. I had been there before nearly two decades ago, but friends warned me that it had changed. […]
