This month I left Ottawa for the first time in years. It was marvelous to be somewhere else, doing something else, for once. It was not quite as marvelous to be in transit again. There’s nothing as boring as travel delay stories, but here’s a flavour of the experience: People were taking photos of the […]
Miscellaneous
It’s tricky, trying to understand a crisis when you’re in it. How invasive it can feel to read apocalyptic headlines about your home, like having overwrought, uninvited strangers show up to a family funeral. So terrible, so shocking, people say, snapping photos. People are sorry about the wildfires ravaging northern California right now, again, but […]
Right now, my summer feet are having fun in the beautiful red dirt in the Southwest. 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 […]
Manhattan rattles my ears. Subway lines shake the fine bones inside my head. Cars honking on the street change the way my brain physically functions. When I stayed in the city a week ago I noticed the same as I always do: noise. I live in a quiet place off the grid in Western Colorado […]
A butterfly in my kitchen—that’s a surprise. It would have had to flutter up a lot of stairs and down a lot of hallways to get here from outside. I suspect it actually came in with some kale. I think it’s a cabbage white butterfly, a sweet little agricultural pest that arrived on this side […]
Mushrooming is more than a passion. It’s an obsession, and after two poor seasons in a row, we are finally experiencing some fungus among us in Colorado. Which means that it has become very difficult for me to go hiking or running or biking, because as soon as my mushroom eyes catch glimpse of a […]
Early on in the pandemic, a few days before Switzerland’s first lockdown, participants in an international colloquium arrived in Basel and immediately started to flounder as they tried to navigate new norms for social interaction: “Hey,” said one conference-goer to another, waving. “Are you doing the elbow thing? Or are you doing the other thing?” […]
Canada’s politics are stable enough that I can afford to be, more or less, a single-issue voter. Six years ago, I wrote to the incoming member of parliament for my riding – a candidate for whom I did not vote. “Dear Ms. McKenna: Congratulations on your new position as our Member of Parliament. My parents […]