One cold night a couple of weeks ago, my family and I bundled up to bike out to a park in one of Seattle’s northern suburbs. We have a routine for such trips after all these years. First we layer, and then we bedeck our bikes with lights: front lights, back lights, hub lights, even […]
Miscellaneous
I originally wrote this on October 3, 2012, and I’ve long since lost track of this young man. I hope he and his brother have sorted out their battle about science and religion by now but I sort of doubt they have. And in any case, this same battle is now showing up in different […]
I try not to use social media, but I can’t bring myself to quit entirely. Despite the evil it has wrought, Facebook remains a good way to keep tabs on friends I otherwise don’t see or connect with often, or at all. I decided a while ago that these sweet updates were worth the otherwise […]
I first published this post in April, 2020. Today things are better, but not fixed. We have childcare, but it feels precarious. There are snow days and teacher training days and holidays and sick days. So Many Sick Days. On Mondays, public school ends at 1:45pm. ONE FORTY-FIVE! And there are still too many things […]
For years, now, I’ve had a scrap of digital paper on my computer desktop with four words on it: Felicia, the Fermilab Ferret. A memorial to an extraordinary life. A reminder to channel the legendary little animal’s spirit into something strange and new. Little poems, perhaps. And, now, finally, I have. But first: her story. […]
I took a train with my high school kid to Salt Lake City for a little urban immersion on Winter Break. We disembarked at 2:30 in the morning in a city experiencing what some said was the biggest blizzard they’d seen in a decade. That early morning, with packs on our backs, we walked into […]
Dear LWON readers, This is California’s only major free-flowing river, 400 miles north of San Francisco in the Klamath Mountains near the northern border with Oregon. That outrageous aquamarine color comes from a rock called serpentinite, which contains a vivid, yellow-green mineral with the equally delightful name of lizardite. Could I see the bottom of […]
My dad’s 100th birthday would have been this weekend. 100! It seems incredible—so many years since 1923, so many things that happened in them. How different it must have been, how many things might have been not so different at all. These are the things I think I remember that he told me: behind […]
