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 […]
Nature
People who have come to visit say that it is quiet here. Now it is even quieter. Fewer car drive by, fewer planes fly overhead. In the hour before dawn I no longer hear the train whistle. My neighbor used to leave early each morning for dental school, 50 miles away. Now there is no […]
I have been a newshound for a long time, but ever since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, my consumption of the stuff has reached absurd levels. I spend hours checking headlines and Twitter, desperate for some fresh morsel of information: an update of confirmed case numbers (local, national, global), an official who said something […]
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 […]
I have begun to visit the trail behind my house with religious devotion. It switchbacks up a sundrunk slope, mostly melted out from the snow, and tops out at a cliff overlooking the valley where I live. I go because it’s spring, and the smell of thawing soil and sweetening ponderosa bark calls me outside. […]
For the love of trees and their leafy kin, and with Australia’s horrendous fires on my mind, here’s a piece I wrote a few years ago about the surprising capabilities of plants that make their burning especially sad. Meanwhile, researchers continue to uncover remarkable details about plants’ lives, as in this report about their (almost […]
A partially fictionalized diary of antvasion Sept. 15 Line of small black ants across the kitchen floor. Origin and destination unclear. Some have abdomens cocked upward at a jaunty angle, like ant hotrods. This makes them look more aggressive and hooligany somehow. Gone before noon, as if they had never been. Sept. 16 (Forget about […]
These little friends got a ride home with me from the gym the other morning, stuck into the spiderwebs that cling to the side mirrors. There were more all across the front of the car, stuck in the small valley between the folded windshield wipers and the glass. I was delighted—could this be seed dispersal […]