My favorite tree in the world grows about a mile along my favorite hiking trail in my neighborhood. I wouldn’t say it is the most beautiful tree; it is a little scraggly, and its trunk is not straight, and its needles seem a little thin. There are prettier trees on this particular trail, even, and […]
Trees
Last month I wrote about maps and dog walks and grief and stuff, and I illustrated it with a photo of a majestic stump in my partner’s neighborhood. I guess life needed to give me a lesson about impermanence, because that stump is now half gone. I imagine the city plans to plant a new […]
The maple tree across the street is shivering. Just this morning, she’d stopped my breath with the red-gold flames of her leaves. Now I watch from the kitchen window as brutal gusts shred her gorgeous coat and dash the scraps to the ground. My eyes stay fixed on the bare tree while my mind cycles […]
It’s hard to know what to say, every twist and turn becoming a knot. Forces are crashing, glass flying. I’m up in the mountains where ancient volcanoes choked themselves to death, then eroded for 30 million years into the throaty remnants of a Colorado hotspot. Forests have grown on the rubble and I’ve been walking […]
One of the great signs of spring in Washington, D.C., is the herds of middle schoolers who arrive, on trips to Learn About America. I got to partake in this annual migration in a small way myself this year; a friend from college had brought her very own eighth grader to town for spring break. […]
One Sunday in November, my boyfriend and I were arriving back at his house at noon or so, after a visit to the market for a baguette and bacon. As I waited for him to unlock his door, I looked at the pretty maple tree next to me. It had Christmas lights wrapped around its […]
Cicadas are the best bugs. The 17-year cicadas emerged here in the D.C. area two years ago and I haven’t gotten over it yet. Everyone knows this, and that’s why Our Kate texted me on Monday with a link to a new paper in the journal Science about the effects of cicadas on the food […]
An Icelandic beach, which I did not visit this summer. Summer is not over, officially, just yet; I know, it’s past Labor Day, but it is still Lower Summer* here and I am not ready. So although it is not gone, I am already mourning its end, especially the things I did not do, and […]