Since I published a book about beavers two years ago, I’ve heard from dozens, maybe hundreds, of readers with their own beaver experiences to share. This is a wonderful perk of authorhood: When you tell your own story, you attract others. I’ve gotten emails from folks who have hand-fed blackberries to wild beavers, who have […]
Nature
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 […]
In March, when the boys and I started walking at the beach every morning, I decided I would re-learn the names of shorebirds. Not the gulls—even the professor who originally taught me the names of shorebirds said not to worry too much about gulls. But the other ones, the ones with the w’s in their […]
A few days ago, I was walking idly along a mountainside near my house when I noticed the lower branches of a ponderosa pine, heavy with bullet-sized pollen cones. Intrigued by their purplish color, I plucked one, piercing it with my thumbnail. The juice came out magenta as a beet. Natural inks have been enjoying […]
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 […]
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 […]