Ode to materialism

When I lived in a small town in Colorado, I knew a woman who most people would describe as a hoarder. She made her home in a log cabin not far from a winding river, under ragged cottonwood trees that shed downy tufts in early summer, and showers of gold each autumn. You could see […]

Last Word

March 26-30 Helen and her co-conspirators created a peep show like none other to start the week. In a menagerie of fossiliferous marshmallowness, they followed the original ichthyosaurus discovery in 1810-11 by Mary Anning on the coast of Southwest England, brilliantly replacing Mary with a marshmallow peep. This will make perfect sense if you see […]

Feral daffodils

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud  by William Wordsworth   I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.   Continuous as the stars that […]

The Last Word

March 19-23, 2018 Sarah knows so many lovely words, and on Monday, writes about learning even more. When they talked among themselves, they spoke exclusively in Chilean Spanish, which, one of them—Fernando—gravely informed me, is even worse for outsiders than Argentine Spanish. I was awash in a sea of musical sounds whose meanings I could only grasp at […]

When Friendship was Different

Within the last three years, two of my closer university friends have died. I moved away from Toronto a decade ago, and with those moves I was less frequently in touch with my college friends, but I always assumed we could go on picking up where we left off whenever I was in town. In […]

Redux: The secret placebo experiment we call homeopathy

Beginning in April, the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine will no longer be able to provide patients with homeopathic remedies funded by the UK’s taxpayers. This is part of a larger UK crackdown on homeopathy that has gotten underway over the past 18 months. Late in 2016, homeopathy was banned in one of the country’s […]

Finding the words

Most of us probably remember the first word we spoke in our native language. Mine was “Cat,” for I was fascinated by the ornery old Siamese that my parents kept when I was a baby. From there, I’m sure, I learned a child’s standard repertoire: “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Doggie,” the colors red-yellow-green-blue, and those most basic […]

The Last Word

March 12 – 16, 2018 Raise your kids to ask questions and they do.  Lots of questions.  Many many questions, many of which require you to decide something.  Emma lists every question and you could get tired just reading them.  Commenters also frazzled. Michelle find a guy who sonifies weather data.  That is, he takes […]