Yesterday, I took a walk in the winter desert where snow on sandstone melted and filled dishes eroded into rock. A common local name for these shallow catchments, just enough to drink, is waterpocket. You’ll also hear kissing pool. That’s how you access them, down on your knees, lips touching the surface. Water conveys itself […]
Miscellaneous
This post originally ran October 30, 2017 Sand blowing and grains hurdling over each other, landing and knocking the next, is called saltation. This is how dunes move, not sheering chaos, but each grain effecting the other, billiard balls knocking each other down the line. Kids found that if they stood on a dune crest, […]
Our first love may have been the written word, but the People of LWON are also avid watchers of film and television. Here’s what has been flickering across our screens this year: Jessa: My most moving television experience of 2019 has been the BBC and HBO co-production Years and Years. The inciting incident is that […]
This post appeared about a year ago, when I first joined LWON. I’m reposting it now because the Boschian horror that is ice skating season has crept up on me again, and I still don’t have disability insurance. “This is a nightmare,” I said to my boyfriend as we walked up to a skating rink […]
We’ve reached the end of another trip around the sun, which means Twitter is chockablock with year-end round-ups — here’s what I wrote, read, accomplished, etcetera — a phenomenon that generally leaves me feeling like a feckless, uncultured slacker. This December, though, I’ve resolved to celebrate my experiences rather than wallow in retrospective regret. For […]
If there’s any animal that could use a new PR agency, it’s got to be the electric eel. I mean, think about it – what other animal doesn’t even have its own correct name? You’ve probably heard that an electric “eel” is no eel at all but rather a fish (a knifefish, to be exact). From this […]
At a biological field station in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona — towering canyons and clear-running creeks — a Stanford scientist attending a poetry workshop volunteered to get up for an evening reading. He’d spent the week studying with poet Sherwin Bitsui in an environmental writing program put on by Orion magazine, using specimen […]
Some things are sisters, if you know how to look at them like a wildfire sun and a new penny like snowy boughs and salamander feet
