A couple weeks ago, we were driving through Wyoming when I saw a sign for the Oregon Trail Cutoff. At this point we’d been in the car for something like four hours, and blessedly we were on some stretch of highway with reception, so I googled it. The cutoff, I learned, was the Lander Trail, […]
Miscellaneous
This piece is from a few years ago, and I’ll have you know I’m working steadily on a new book and continuing to shape my identity and dreaming of bottle-feeding goats in my next life. I continue to fret over the tribalism and the flies. I’m not sure what any of it means, but it’s […]
In shipping my grandfather’s 200-pound desk from my cousin in San Francisco to me in Ottawa, we found, too late, that Ottawa is devoid of bonded warehouses. This matters because customs can only be cleared for large objects like this through a warehouse bonded for such a purpose, and the nearest of these facilities is […]
Note: This post is about suicide, so please skip it if you’re not up for that right now. Last month we lost a friend of ours, a seventeen year-old girl. My first impulse when I got the call was to clean our house. I didn’t know what else to do. There was nothing to do, […]
Last summer I wrote in this space about discovering figs. This summer I was ready for them. My neighbor with the fig tree started texting with progress reports in mid July. In August, they hit: Figs. Figs, figs, figs, figs. I’ve been on many fig-retrieval expeditions in the last two weeks. I arrive, bowl in […]
This post originally ran on October 11, 2011. Back then, I didn’t really understand why people would use these sensory deprivation pods. In the wake of the past 5 years, I can only hope one day we can all have our own sensory deprivation pods. The second I close the hatch behind me, it occurs […]
This post originally appeared in September of 2020.
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 […]
