November 27 – December 1, 2017 Michelle, hoping to inoculate her daughter and everybody else’s daughter against rampant and pervasive patriarchy, compiles a girl-centric list of bedtime reading. After all, the holidays loom, presents will be given. Erik kills plants. He doesn’t mean to, though to be honest he doesn’t love them all that much. But […]
Miscellaneous
Last Sunday I saw a mountain lion, a full body profile, spotted from a dirt road. Healthy size and age, tail like a rope. By the time we backed up the truck, it was gone, disappeared into a brambly ponderosa forest. I don’t know why, to find tracks, or a scent, I jumped out […]
Since I wrote this post a few months ago, the beloved books mentioned here have been joined on our shelves by Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2 (the brand-new and very worthy sequel to Rebel Girls, described below) and Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World. Now, after this year of extraordinary […]
The Last Word November 20-24, 2017 Sarah changed her landscape, and finds herself changed. I never meant to be one of those people who would trade redrock bones of desert and mountain crags and the velvet nakedness of tundra for the claustrophobic press of forest. For a place so green and eager to grow that […]
Rebecca I have the worst memory. I say this a lot, and I worry about it a lot. I forget meaningful details, or snippets of conversations I know are important. I forget to whom I’ve told something, and then I tell them again, and sometimes they look at me funny and I realize I’m […]
Craig I like to think that being thankful carries weight, that it occupies an influential space in the world. In a series of 2003 studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, subjects kept journals reporting their levels of gratitude. Each of three studies found that people who experienced more gratitude “exhibited heightened […]
In caves and rock walls of the southern Utah desert, pictographs have been painted, added to the backs of clamshell-shaped sandstone enclosures. Many are noted to have acoustic properties, meaning these ancient, Indigenous images seem to be correlated with the way sound reflects around them. I’ve spoken in a normal voice back and forth from […]
I never meant for this to happen. When I moved to the Pacific Northwest from arid Colorado three years ago, I was one of those people who insisted on horizons. The town where I was born is a place where the foothills of the Rockies stand like a cliffy coastline overlooking a dry sea of […]
