I am so angry, so sad. Today I drove my two children to the first day of a weeklong day-camp with a nature theme. They are learning about local species, pressing flowers, that kind of thing. The teachers expected that the kids would spend most of the day outside in nature. Instead, the kids will […]
Parenting
This summer, I decided not to cut the grass in my backyard. I’ve long argued for letting a little more wildness into our gardens, but the cult of the lawn is a powerful cultural force and for years I, like most of us, have conformed and kept the back lawn mown. Ideally, I’d some day […]
A while back I took my toddler for a walk in his stroller to the local café in my old neighborhood. I loved it there because I always felt like a rock star. Everyone would be happy to see me and say nice things to me and want to pinch my cheeks. Okay, so, I […]
A man and his well-traveled family came by the house the other night, friends of friends needing a place to stay. He was a gray-bearded mountain climber, tall plank of a man 70 years old, one eye squinting, the other permanently closed from some accident in his youth that I didn’t ask about. He came […]
Last time I was in my hometown of Seattle, I walked by the movie theater I worked at for many years in the 1990s and 2000s and found it permanently closed. Being sad and angry about changes in Seattle is kind of a thing, but I wasn’t just upset about a piece of the city–and […]
Decision fatigue is real. Decision fatigue is the mental exhaustion and reduced willpower that comes from making many, many micro-calls every day. My modern American lifestyle, with its endless variety of choices, from a hundred kinds of yogurt at the grocery store to the more than 4,000 movies available on Netflix, breeds decision fatigue. But […]
Having a baby is a miracle. Everyone tells me so, so it must be true. It’s also an adventure – again, according to pretty much everybody. I’ve had a lot of adventures and spent years searching for miracles and I have to say, those words don’t really fit. It’s more like one long psychology experiment. […]
Some years ago I attended a beach barbecue in Juneau, Alaska on a gray summer day. The adults drank beer in a ring around a fire where salmon collars sizzled and talked about the price of boats and politics. The kids ran in a mixed-age herd closer to the surf, clambering over driftwood and getting […]
