This spring, after weeks of quarantine, my husband was probably already sick of me when I started reading about cicadas. As I ventured further into a Wikipedia wormhole, I shared with him the most interesting tidbits. “Did you know there are multiple broods?” I asked, as he played a game on his phone on the […]
Miscellaneous
It is a Gamble tradition that each child can select one present to open on Christmas Eve, ahead of the Christmas Day onslaught. On a nature ramble yesterday with my father and me, my son asked if he could open his when we got back to the house, around 2pm. “Christmas Eve,” says I. “The […]
The first recorded sighting of the strange birds occurred in August. A man posted a picture on my Facebook neighborhood group: Plump, chicken-esque body. Red beak. Black-and-white striped wings. Bandit mask over the eyes. Commenters were quick to ID the bird. Definitely a chukar. More photos revealed there were at least five roaming the streets. […]
Just down the road from my house, there lived a bull. He had a massive, muscular neck and a glossy black coat that rippled as he strode around the pear orchard that served as his pasture. In fall, when the pears ripened, the bull rubbed against the old trees, shaking their trunks until the fruit […]
* Image by Pedro Szekeley, via Flickr/Creative Commons license
For the last few days I’ve been slowly completing an annual rite of fall: raking leaves. The colossal Norway maple that looms over our yard, which sheds each October with all the messy gusto of a yellow lab on a dark couch, makes this a rather herculean task. For most people, leaf-raking is utterly quotidian, […]
When I look in the mirror, though everything is mildly blurry, I can’t not see the signs of aging I used to think might miraculously skip me—back when I was being carded in bars (at 43!!). But there they all are, the sags and swollen bits, the divots and wrinkles, the spots and stiff (and […]
My wife weighs in on the mysterious reflective object that appeared and a week later disappeared in the southern Utah desert. She says if this tower is technically neither an obelisk nor a monolith, why not call it a monolisk, or an obelith? Monoöbelisk. Two days after its discovery by a helicopter pilot hauling wildlife […]
