While visiting the Baltic seacoast of Lithuania a couple weeks ago, walking with my wife among hills of half-grassy sand dunes, I heard what I swore were sandhill cranes. I scanned an October sky pillared with distant cumulus until finding giant letters written high overhead, southward V’s and W’s a hundred yards long. Sandhill cranes […]
Nature
This post first appeared in September of 2019 and the mushrooms never stop coming. Paul Kroeger is a wizard. Rolling his quick little cigarettes like skinny sticks of dynamite, he halts and flows like bearded water, crossing streets of East Vancouver at angles between the cars. He slips behind houses, not the path of his […]
A few weeks ago, a cicada landed on my screen of my open window. This was one of the regular cicadas that come out every year. They’re much more secretive than their 17-year cousins. Well, most of the time they’re secretive. They don’t seem very secretive when they’re on your screen window, making their extremely […]
Behold this mighty tree! It’s in an unassuming bit of woods near my parents’ house in Silver Spring, Md. So unassuming, in fact, that this December 2021 visit was the first time I had set foot in that particular bit of woods, and my family moved to the neighborhood in 1985. The local parks folks […]
It was such a nice night. September in the low mountains is lovely — hot by mid-afternoon, cool enough for a sweater by sundown — and it’s the best time of year to sit outside after dinner. We were enjoying the peace of the late-summer forest. And then the skunk came. The dog was in […]
Last summer I wrote in this space about discovering figs. This summer I was ready for them. My neighbor with the fig tree started texting with progress reports in mid July. In August, they hit: Figs. Figs, figs, figs, figs. I’ve been on many fig-retrieval expeditions in the last two weeks. I arrive, bowl in […]
In October 2019 I wrote about the moment when I realized that I can tell the difference between a fish crow and an American crow. Here’s the short version: A fish crow sounds like a crow, but instead of saying “caw!” it says “uh-uh.” I heard a crow say “uh-uh.” Eureka! Fish crow! The almost […]
This post originally ran in September of 2014 and I’ve not been back to this wild desert party since. I’ve just returned from Burning Man, a Mad Max bacchanalia in the desert of western Nevada. I went to see what my civilization was up to, what fiery pinnacle we’ve invented. I also wanted to see […]