I’m so happy to see these guys year after year, so I’m celebrating them again here on LWON.I don’t know why this came out in “verse,” but here it is. I’m no poet, but I had fun regardless. And if you read it right, it really does scan! Upon my feeder yesterdayA cowbird male did […]
Miscellaneous
It’s summer, and I’ve been thinking of what poet Billy Collins called those, “forlorn chairs/though at one time it must have seemed/a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.” Even situated, as they usually are, to take in the view, it’s hard for those chairs to compete with the attention-grabbing distractions found on our […]
This post from years back still makes me smile. I hope you’ll also enjoy it again! Not every juicy morsel works in every recipe. As a writer, I often come across something meaty, think, HUH! and then drag the link to a rarely visited desktop folder because, you know, I’m not writing a piece about […]
Almost every night since late February I’ve slept on our deck, watching the star-scape creep westward month by month. Scorpius recently came out of hiding and now the great space scorpion is standing on its tail in the middle of the southern sky. Jupiter has been sailing toward the evening glory of Venus, Power and […]
This post first ran in the early days of the pandemic. There are some parts of the silence that I miss. But today, I am working in the back room of an elementary school as the “adult on site” during a camp run by high school students. There is singing and shrieking and laughter and […]
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the nature of knowledge and how we acquire it. My training as a scientist taught me to revere the scientific method, and I continue to hold science in the highest regard. Science can teach us much about the world and ourselves, and as I’ve written elsewhere, it can allow us to […]
In May, Doug Burgum, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, traveled to the tiny town of Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska, to announce a new policy: caribou hunters will soon be allowed to use all-terrain vehicles inside the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Under most circumstances this would piss me off—another misguided plan from […]
We first published this conversation 14 years ago. At least half of my peers from high school and university have chosen not to have kids at all. In the end, I stuck with just the one, and so did Michelle. Michelle and Jessa converse about the reasons we chose to stop at one child. Jessa: […]
