A few months ago, I visited the Pasteur Institute, a research center in Paris dedicated to the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases. The trip included a tour of the apartment and crypt of Louis Pasteur, the 19th century French chemist and microbiologist who developed vaccines against rabies and anthrax. My favorite part of the […]
Miscellaneous
I first wrote about our old, scared dog five years ago in the summer. He’d had a hard life before he got to us, and as he got older, he seemed to get more and more anxious. Last month while we were traveling, we got a call from our dear vet that it was time. […]
The inevitable knock came one afternoon this September — the tail of Spokane summer, the season of drought and grasshoppers. My landlord stood on the stoop, placid and patient as a mountain lion, shiny black SUV idling in my — his — driveway. How’s it going? I asked, attempting nonchalance. He took off his sunglasses. […]
Sometime in the 1920s, somewhere in France. A young girl from an influential middle-class French family had been found in a field, stabbed to death. There was no obvious perpetrator. The police rounded up the usual suspects – which is to say, immigrants – and found a Jewish door-to-door salesman who had been in the […]
A couple of months ago, my husband and I drove into the Sonoran desert. We were in pursuit of the weird, heading for a mountain celebrating God’s love and constructed almost entirely out of latex paint. We left Palm Springs and drove south toward the Salton Sea.
Yesterday the People of LWON discussed our hopes for 2020. Today, we reflect on what we hope to leave behind. Ann: Serious answer is, that’s a little complicated. After a certain point in life, you’ve got more behind you than in front and surely it would be blind-stupid graceless to not weigh carefully what you […]
Because Sarah wrote about grief on Monday and because today my son would have been 51, so then what else would I bother writing about except grief or rather grief as love’s subset or corollary or unavoidable consequence. Love → grief, love ꝏ grief. That little ꝏ sign, that side-ways 8, that’s the math/astro symbol […]
The other night we were supposed to see a meteor shower with fireballs. That’s what they predicted, fireballs. My gal and I went out on the deck in the late fall chill, dropped a single sleeping pad, covered ourselves in a blanket, and stared up at a midnight quarter moon. The Taurid meteor shower and […]
