Rescued

God, I love dogs. That’s why recently I started volunteering at a facility where dogs from the very worst conditions around the world are brought for rehab and prep for adoption. It’s run by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), and it’s in a warehouse at a Maryland address not widely known, as […]

Color Theories

This post first ran in April 2019. As I get ready to go on maternity leave, I’m struck by how many things, large and small, had to go right for the tentative desires I felt five years ago — for a garden, and maybe even a family — to materialize. It’s been a messy and […]

Bloom Where You’re Planted

On May Day, my brother and I used to sneak around our neighborhood with our mom, secretly delivering flowers to unsuspecting neighbors. Here are some May Day flowers for you. In spring 2020, I wasn’t sure how to use Instagram. I mean, I technically knew how to use it. When I logged on, it was […]

The Dream Camera

If you could record your dreams, would you ever be able to stop watching?  That’s a central plot point in Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders’ three- to five-hour arthouse flop/work of staggering genius (depending on which cut you watch) from 1991. He threw cyberpunk, detective noir, and road movie into a blender […]

A New Age of Brightness

Last night I took a crowded elevator to the hundredth floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Not rattled or shaken, we were propelled to the top in 52 seconds, like being beamed up. Doors opened and we all poured into a high-windowed space looking onto the electric-white boroughs of New York City. A revolving door […]

The obstetric dilemma

We attended our first childbirth preparation course last week, Pete and I. It was 2.5 hours long, on Zoom, and would have made an excellent drinking game (drink every time you hear the word blood! Or mucus!) had I been drinking. Instead, we just watched it in bed on my laptop, passing a block of […]

Earth at Night in Color

Did you see the stars come out during the eclipse? Did the colors change in a Magic Hour kind of way? Did darkness fall without long shadows, and do you miss the experience already? I’m here to tell you there’s another way to see that, and you get Tom Hiddleston in with the bargain. Growing […]

Ode to the Brown-Headed Cowbird

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 land,Brown-headed with his body coalAt first glance not too grand.But then I took the time to learnThe […]