The Scientist in the Garden

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 […]

Make Me Like a Tree, and Leave Me

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 and the Flock

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 […]

Summer Feet

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 […]

The Rites of Summer

This first ran June 25, 2010.  It’s from our beloved founder, Heather Pringle.  She’s an archeology writer, meaning she has to follow archeologists wherever they go.  This time, they went to the Arizona desert.  I can picture them asking, “where’s the writer? did she faint again?” Sit in air-conditioning and comfort yourself in not being Heather […]

Live, Laugh, Shun

If you grew up in the U.S. South or Midwest, there’s a good chance you are familiar with the “live laugh love” home decor aesthetic. For the uninitiated, it’s hard to describe, as it takes many forms, but, like US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once defined obscenity: you know it when you see it. […]

Free AI Lesson Plans

I’ve been playing around with the AI text-to-visual generator Midjourney, whose iterations on human words make the user feel they are working alongside a true collaborator. The results are impossible to direct but full of ideas that are a few associative leaps away from the prompts I give it. There’s no other way for me […]