Note: This post is about suicide, so please skip it if you’re not up for that right now. Last month we lost a friend of ours, a seventeen year-old girl. My first impulse when I got the call was to clean our house. I didn’t know what else to do. There was nothing to do, […]
Miscellaneous
Last summer I wrote in this space about discovering figs. This summer I was ready for them. My neighbor with the fig tree started texting with progress reports in mid July. In August, they hit: Figs. Figs, figs, figs, figs. I’ve been on many fig-retrieval expeditions in the last two weeks. I arrive, bowl in […]
This post originally ran on October 11, 2011. Back then, I didn’t really understand why people would use these sensory deprivation pods. In the wake of the past 5 years, I can only hope one day we can all have our own sensory deprivation pods. The second I close the hatch behind me, it occurs […]
This post originally appeared in September of 2020.
This post first appeared in 2012, when I was full of enthusiasm for seed catalogs and tomatoes. Now, my tomatoes are full of enthusiasm, too. A volunteer that sprung up in a planter with succulents in it has now been growing strong since last year, bursting with tomatoes even through the winter. What kind is […]
These days I find it hard not to ponder the end of things…the pandemic (if ever!), menopause (I’ve heard 10 years of hot flashes?!), life. I wrote this about the third one a little ways back and I haven’t changed my mind. — When I die, I want to be gently curled into the fetal […]
The fog is thick and so you hope the auklets will come early. They do, a few minutes before sunset: ten, maybe twenty of them, although it is hard to tell since they are for the time being far enough away to be little more than dots. They circle over the waves in a tight […]
My summer feet are hoping to be on vacation right now, but they’re worried about wildfires. This post first ran in August 2019. At the beginning of summer, my feet often feel tender. There is a particular stretch of asphalt between the university parking lot and the beach that is especially pitted, and the sharp […]