Nature
This post began with a question from my dear friend, the novelist and documentary filmmaker George Lerner. Looking over two years of footage from South Texas, I noticed something striking: I have lots and lots of glorious images filmed around sunset, but scant few decent shots at sunrise. Why is this, I wondered — is […]
Snow falls often where I live now. I love it, mostly. I do like to work, so I don’t love when it creates snow days. But I love its crisp delicacy, falling soft and softly falling. I love its silence and its brightness. I love the way it tattles on the deer and turkeys and […]
Given the choice, I wouldn’t be a bear, though it’s tempting to skip this dark season and live off my fat. Far below the metabolic plane of sleep, my body would be as cold as death to the touch. Parts of the brain that dart about in REM sleep are turned off, brain functions reduced […]
Thank goodness for ravines that are inconvenient to build on. This one cuts through the suburbs near my parents’ house. You can hear the Beltway from the spot where I took this picture, but the deer wander by anyway, and the squirrels, and the occasional human. Photo: Helen Fields
Recently Ann wrote that, in the pandemic, she’d been paying attention to “the world that exists when I’m not noticing it, the world that goes on about its own business.” The other day, the world did something fantastic. It passed through the dust from an asteroid, giving us the Geminids. This is apparently one of […]
For the last few days I’ve been slowly completing an annual rite of fall: raking leaves. The colossal Norway maple that looms over our yard, which sheds each October with all the messy gusto of a yellow lab on a dark couch, makes this a rather herculean task. For most people, leaf-raking is utterly quotidian, […]
Space is this abstract concept to lots of you. I know so many people, including so many writers, who could not care less about the subject. They are bored, at best, by everything that exists beyond the eggshell-thin layer of this planet’s atmosphere. The wild, kaleidoscopic kingdom of life on this world is enough for […]
