On Sunday we sat outside on the sidewalk and carved our pumpkins. As we worked, we reminisced about past pumpkin carving sessions. My mom and my brother and I used to carve them on the kitchen floor, on the rectangle squares of linoleum. My husband and his sister used to carve their pumpkins in the […]
Nature
This post originally ran on November 11, 2014. It’s 6 am on an early November morning, and I am tiptoeing up a juniper hillside with a rifle slung over my shoulder. I’m following Adam, my friend and guide, when suddenly he stops. “Listen.” It’s still completely dark, except for the sea of stars above us, […]
This is a picture of a rift in our world. It was taken June 21 at Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, in a rip called Fissure 8. What a remarkably utilitarian name for a tear in the planet. I was captivated by images like these all summer, and I forgot about them when my attention turned to […]
It’s embarrassing enough that it took me 12 years to go to Channel Islands National Park, especially since I see the islands almost every day. Last month, I got on board the dive boat that would take us to the place they call the Galapagos of North America. At last! The captain said something about […]
I began my undergraduate studies in 1995. I completed them in 1999 and moved into a shared apartment overlooking the San Francisco Bay surrounded by a mix of native plants and xeriscaping. Since then, I have lived in South Africa, Santa Cruz, Mexico City, DC, and even spent a year on the road. Never in […]
Note: This post originally appeared in December of 2016. I find a stick and use it to break up the dry twists of coyote scat I have found on the trail. Shit is nature’s obituary page. In each pile are the traces of lives recently lost. In this particular excreta I find a sprinkling of […]
I don’t know when I first saw Cisco, Utah. My early memory of it is imprecise, gathered from a series of impressions over years into one blurry composite. A crumbling edifice of corner store, covered in a mural of eagle and mountains that is in turn covered in black scrawls of graffiti. Dead cars. Piles […]
This is an image of a deluge, an absolute inundation, a drainage basin filled to the brim, a coast whose cup runneth over, total saturation, a scene that would make Noah cringe. This is, as my friend pointed out, a f*@kload of water. This image shows how the land changed after Hurricane Florence was done, […]
