First must have come listeningto the wind or regardingthe movements of animals,then monitoring the starsand sometime after thatscrutinizing fire;but somewhere in there belongswatching the progress of a river… Billy Collins, “The List of Ancient Pastimes” Most of the last couple weeks I’ve been sleeping on the ground. I stayed in southern Utah canyons long enough […]
Nature
When we first moved into this house, we planted a fig tree in the backyard. It looked sad and scraggly for a long time—years, in fact. I would go over to the houses of friends who had fig trees in August, and these trees would be dripping with figs. I would ask how old the […]
It’s dark well into the morning now, and the dark is glorious. The kids sleep later, so I went for a walk on Sunday down to the beach. The sun hadn’t quite risen yet and I felt rested and settled by the quietness of fall. The sun seemed to rise slowly, too—plenty of time to […]
Finding a decent bedtime story to read to your kid is harder than you might think. Most childrens books are either pointless (Superman likes red! Superman likes blue!), overproduced (A book with buttons and recorded dinosaur sounds! Wait, who made these recordings?), boring (Pokey the Bear showed Susie she had the strength the whole time!), […]
At 4 am, driving west from Ashland, Wisconsin, I flicked on BBC news and heard a report out of the North Fork of the Gunnison, a place I lived for a couple decades in western Colorado. It was about oil and gas development and the unprecedented rollback of environmental protections. Voices I know from home […]
“It’s like a good plague,” read the tweet from one of my NPR station’s editors. Epic floods across the Midwest this summer, which more than one local official referred to as “biblical,” brought a wave of frogs and toads to Missouri. It is hard to overstate how much water inundated my adopted state, and […]
Squirrels are comforted by birds’ easy chit-chat, new research tells us. Biologists already knew the scurrying rodents tuned into birds’ alarm calls, but they didn’t realize that the mammals responded to songs about the good times, too. Content chirps suggest to squirrels that all is well. To me, too. At this time of year especially […]