My garden has a guardian, an enormous black-and-yellow orb spider. I look for her every morning when I enter the enclosure we built last spring, to keep the deer out and create a protected spot for Calliope to bask in the sun and chase lizards. She’s mostly blind, this spider. But she can sense me […]
Miscellaneous
Cameron’s new children’s book, National Monuments of the USA, hadn’t gone to print when she and I met up for tea at the annual science writers conference in Memphis last October. She was still fact-checking and finalizing, and having a (tiny!)(Cameron: big!) freakout about how the book would be received. To teach history to children […]
This first ran Sept. 22, 2010 — the same time of year as now. It’s not clear that the auction is still going on, and maybe it’s been replaced by a 5K race, and maybe by a bunch of other auctions in different places. The clinic is building a new home and has a lot […]
Mom spreads maps over the dining room table. They’re oldish, not ancient, but the home I see in them is not the home I know. They are all of Colorado—mostly cities at the nexus of Rocky Mountains and High Plains, 40, 50, 60 years ago. The outpost of Ward, a funky old mining town up […]
I had a conversation with an owl the other night. It was a barred owl, a pretty common species in the woods around our cabin in central Virginia. The bird got going early—well before dusk—and I happened to be outside with my native wooden flute (purchased from this lovely flutemaker in Canada), so I found […]
Returning to this creek was my stepdad’s idea. At 78, he wanted to try it again, but do it right this time. Twenty-some years ago, when we first hiked this mostly untrailed alpine canyon in Colorado, we planned it as a day trip with a car at either end for a shuttle. My mom was […]
On July 30th, 2014, the sky turned black in the middle of the day and a thunderstorm rained tar on our car. That was the final straw of the Yellowknife wildfire season for me; I brought my then-4-year-old son down to Calgary to attend a day camp until the air cleared up North. Back then, […]
On the night of January 8, 1970, I was an A-37 attack jet pilot returning to my home base of Bien Hoa after a mission over the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. It was 1:30am as I reduced the power to separate from my leader and then zoomed the aircraft to 20,000 feet so I could […]
