I’ve been in southern Baja reading Ann Finkbeiner’s accounts of the dismal cold of midwinter and I’ve felt bad. I know what it’s like to shiver in the gray, but Baja happened for me, Sonoran Desert splendor (my home desert), along the whale-happy Sea of Cortez, (the first giant body of salt water I ever […]
Travel
Let me share a travel tip with you. You will not use it. The tip: When you come home from visiting a country with different currency from your own – say, in Europe – hang onto your change. You could spend all your centimes or marks or groschen on airport chocolates, to lighten your wallet. […]
Last week my family traveled to Oregon for an end-of-summer trip. We wanted to start in Bend, in the central part of the state. There we would hike and explore a bit—somewhat to her dismay, I was especially eager to take my daughter up South Sister, one of the Three Sisters volcanoes—before driving down to […]
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the past lately. As I get my parents’ house ready for sale, I’ve been looking at decades of memorabilia. A dozen or so boxes of my own memories lived in the attic, and the above picture is one of them: a list of things that surprised me […]
I’m not actually much of a doomscroller, but my default choice when I want a moment of distraction is to hop over to Facebook, Instagram, or the Washington Post. And, lately, hopping over to Facebook, Instagram, or the Washington Post brings not fun distraction or even interesting diversion. Instead, it does nothing but give me […]
In December of 2019 I visited Maine to see if it might be a good place for me to live. From the airport I drove straight to the sea. The sky was violet, the ground was covered in snow, and the only other person there was a young woman leaning against the railing, looking out […]
I believe. I don’t know in what exactly, but something is happening out there, gears and orbits turning, disparate points meeting, then moving apart. We’re bound in ways unexplained by simple principles of causality. That is my belief. My youngest turned 18 last week as comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS passed at its closest to Earth, which didn’t […]
This week, a mourning dove has started to build a nest in the walnut tree outside my office window. I see it flying back and forth with twigs in its beak, perching on a piece of webbing, waiting for the right moment to swoop in. Why is a mourning dove building a nest in August? […]
