The Stubborness of Women

By: | October 8, 2025

This post first appeared in November 2023.

For reasons I didn’t fully understand myself (marriage? the cat? surely someone or something else was to blame), I was feeling more than usually lazy, or maybe just unwilling to tolerate the discomfort of writing. It felt like a dangerous malaise, and the only remedy I could think of was to try to soak up some other people’s bravery. So a couple of months ago, I asked our Ann for her recommendations of favorite essayists.

She recommended Montaigne: “I haven’t read him in a while but I loved him,” she wrote. “He was so smart and funny and open.” I trundled off to a used bookstore and picked up a copy of The Essays: A Selection, translated by M.A. Screech. I’m only about three quarters of the way through the book, but I’ve been taking notes and sending them to Ann as I go. She suggested they might make a decent post, strung together. So, in the provisional spirit of Montaigne, I share them with you, dear LWON readers.

10.29.23

To philosophize is to learn how to die

I read this essay while waiting for a big vegetable lasagna to bake. I was in the middle of Montaigne’s exhaustive list of ways to die (killed by a bump from a pig!) and his instructions to continuously keep death at the forefront of our minds, when the timer beeped.

I went to pull the lasagna out and dumped the whole thing upside down onto the oven door, barely missing my feet. After screaming for help, then scooping the charred noodles back into the dish, I went back to the couch and read the following: “I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.” The lasagna looked terrible but tasted great.

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Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

By: | October 6, 2025

Our little farm is nestled in a pinyon juniper habitat that we share with lots of other creatures. Often enough, we encounter these animals close up. Sightings of foxes, coyotes, deer, elk and turkeys are so commonplace as to have become almost (but not quite) uninteresting.

Other creatures we see mostly by the signs they leave behind — paw prints, scat, feathers, fur, or partially eaten prey.  Sometimes they invade our garden, compost pile or orchard. One year, a bear climbed up into a young Honeycrisp tree that was loaded with apples and nearly destroyed it while devouring all the fruit. 

We have a game camera near the back of our property where we can observe creatures coming and going. It’s been a busy summer on the game cam. 

Here’s our neighborhood bear.

A mountain lion has also been hanging around. We’ve been seeing him a lot on the game cam, though never face-to-face (and I’m ok with that).

Oh, and the tigers! Ok, tiger striped cats, but they think they’re tigers. Sometime this summer a mamma cat started hanging around our winery. They were hungry, so I gave in and began feeding her and her five kittens — two black, one gray and two tiger striped tabbies. We have managed to trap all but one of them (still working on it!) to vaccinate and spay or neuter, which I’ve learned is no easy task. 

My Hard-Won, Useless Knowledge

By: | October 3, 2025
Hand holding up train ticket with platform and tracks in background

Let me share a travel tip with you.

You will not use it.

The tip: When you come home from visiting a country with different currency from your own – say, in Europe – hang onto your change. You could spend all your centimes or marks or groschen on airport chocolates, to lighten your wallet. But someday, maybe you’ll come back and you’ll be standing, bleary-eyed, at an airport public transit hub, in front of a ticket machine that only takes coins, and you’ll be a lot happier if you have some of those coins with you.

You see why you won’t be using this advice? First of all, those currencies don’t exist. But much more galling, to me: those damn ticket machines now take my American credit cards. In some places I can even tap my credit card when I get on. I may never have to keep track of a charming foreign subway ticket again. Last year I went to the UK for a week and never even felt the need to get cash.

I used to be an expert of Western European transit ticket buying. What am I supposed to do with my obsolete knowledge now?

It isn’t just tickets. I have a lot of knowledge that I painstakingly acquired and can no longer use. Like knowing how to get to places. I love maps! I know all the good routes in my hometown! But, over the last 20 years, my expertise has been gradually usurped, first by Mapquest and then by various apps.

Even my language skills are losing their value. For a whole year of my life, in the previous century, I spent 20 hours a week in language class in southwestern Japan. A few years ago, I sat down with American friends in a cafe in the western reaches of Tokyo, picked up a menu, began to read out loud – this says black tea, this says green tea, this one has strawberries – and was shocked, even a little crestfallen, when one of them got out her phone, pointed it at the menu, and read it for herself. Google Translate trounced my weak reading skills.

My feelings about all of this increased convenience are complicated. I love when I go to an unfamiliar city and can ride public buses with ease, because my phone tells me where to stand and what number to look for. It’s not really fair that I got to spend a year in my 20s studying a language full-time; that’s an extremely high, expensive barrier to engaging with another society, and it’s nice that other people can do it more easily. And the other day I wanted to read some instructions in Japanese and, yeah, I whipped out my phone.

But, at the same time, acquiring these bodies of knowledge is part of what makes life great. Learning a new language is brain-melting, soul-enlarging. Learning your way around a town builds a mental map of surprises and one-way streets. Hoarding coins for next time means you have happy little envelopes and baggies of metal tucked away in a drawer, carrying hopes of future travels, for your children to find after you die.

Obviously I’m part of a long tradition of people complaining about technological change. The kids these days, they just go out and buy a shirt! In my day, we had to harvest the flax and weave it ourselves! And anyone who’s spent the last few decades chasing computer technology probably knows the feeling. My dad did the data analysis for his PhD with stacks of punch cards; no wonder he struggled to understand how to interact with an app. I still use keyboard shortcuts from an old version of Microsoft Word and live in mild dread of the day when my brain is too creaky to navigate the implants we’re using to order our sub-orbital rocket taxis or whatever.

I’m reminded of Our Tom’s essay In Praise of Crap Technology, in which he lovingly describes his $20 digital music player. Should I take inspiration from Tom? Boycott contactless credit cards in favor of pockets full of euros? Lug around my 4-pound Japanese-English Character Dictionary, just in case I need to decipher a sign? Maybe I should find a paper map of my area, if any still exist, and find my own route to a new destination, current traffic conditions be damned?

But these seem like really pointless protests. Maybe I should just sit back, play a game on my phone, and remember the glory days when I knew something useful.

Photo: Helen Fields, obviously

Thank You For Your Resume. Never Contact Us Again.

By: | October 1, 2025

Dear Jennifer,

Thank you for your interest in working as a writer/editor for our esteemed organization. While your credentials and experience appear to be adequate, we have received a record number of applicants and have decided to move forward with another candidate who is clearly much better and definitely much hotter than you. Even though you are really old, we will keep your resume on file for future opportunities.

–Hiring Manager, Esteemed Organization That Doesn’t Want You, You Loser

What does rejection do to the human brain? How about repeated rejections? Let’s say, four? Or 12? How about 29? It does something, I’ll bet.

As one of thousands recently torn from their jobs and tossed into a pit of talent, where truly good, skilled people are trying to claw their way back to employment without elbowing colleagues in the eye, I looked it up.

It’s a form of social rejection, this “thanks but no thanks” letter many of us keep receiving from potential employers. Evolution tells us to care about it: Social acceptance, in this case being told you are “good enough” (and better than the rest, in fact) to join a particular team, represents safety and access to resources. It makes sense that it would matter.

Apparently, there are “positive” aspects to rejection—it can motivate you to try harder, to reframe your thinking, to set aside your ego, to learn to be patient, yadda yadda. Sort of obvious things that are a little hard to take seriously right now. But make no mistake, social pain is real pain; scientists suggest the brain systems that underlie that ache of rejection likely co-opted the brain circuits supporting physical hurting. That means the two kinds of pain share activity in our somatosensory systems, and that intense social pain (e.g., the deep ache after a romantic breakup plus the crush of spying your ex on a hot date) may glom onto sensory-pain processing regions. It’s messy, this pain thing, and there’s a lot of crosstalk between ache and heartache, between “ouch” and “daaaaaaamn.”

Social pain reaches deep within us in other ways. A relatively new field called social genomics reminds us that the genome isn’t a fixed blueprint but a dynamic system that reacts to human experience. It’s known that negative social interactions can and do affect our health, not just the mental but the physical; more recently, scientists have discovered how our experiences as social beings can even meddle with our gene expression, by way of a host of biological and molecular mechanisms. The brain, the body, the genome…it’s a partnership for better or worse.

If you get rejected enough times, though, I’ve found you start to care less and the physical yearning for acceptance dulls a bit. Especially when you know you’re in good company, which I certainly am in this case, you learn to take the blame off your own shoulders. I like to think this shirking of responsibility gives our fragile egos a fighting chance for a comeback. And more important, that it keeps the message “I’m not good enough” from chipping away at our health and telling our genes what to do.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Male Rain

By: | September 29, 2025


In the Navajo vernacular, this time of year we often get what is called male rain, níłtsą́ bikąʼ. These are drenchers that come on strong and swift, rutting out driveways, turning the river a sudden brown, and they’re usually finished just as fast as they started. This happens when upwellings of heat from the ground collide with cool, moist skies. Other times of the year and in more stable conditions, you get what in Navajo is called female rain, níłtsą́ biʼáád, which falls soft and long, the kind of precipitation that saturates the ground and wets the roots of plants. I’d take either any day, but in the high summer into fall, male rain rules.

Driving a lonely two-lane home from Wyoming, I noticed a silver slash across the highway ahead. Wyoming was just as hot as Colorado, just as hot as about everywhere, and I saw no rain in its scattered clouds. Knife blades of virga reached toward the ground but didn’t make it all the way. As I drove closer to this line across the asphalt, slowing from 70, I could see the air three feet above it misted from exploding raindrops. It wasn’t only rain, it was a fierce rain, and it occupied a space that looked to be fifty feet wide at most, the highway dry to either side. I craned under my windshield and saw a faintest band of gray overhead where a slice of precipitation had fallen out of its cloud. The rain didn’t begin with a drop or two. It came all at once. I sped into a blinding downpour, double-fisted on the steering wheel, eyes dead ahead. My roof and hood sounded like a hail of pea gravel, windshield wipers throwing water everywhere. In another second I broke out the other side trailing a rooster tail of haze. The roar ceased and I kept driving into a dry, sunny day. That was the níłtsą́ bikąʼ, male rain.

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Water Year

By: | September 26, 2025

I usually like the beginning of the school year, but this year I want a do-over. Lucky for me, there’s a new year starting next week: Water Year 2026! We had a surprise storm this week, complete with purple veins of lightning and raindrops filing our barrel to round out the end of water year 2025. And I’ll use this storm to update the following post: it ran a few years ago, but I’m still thinking about water and time.

*

It’s almost October, the start of a new water year. A water year is one of several ways to measure rainfall. This way, water year 2026 starts now–when we hope the rain will begin–and will end next year on September 30. A rainfall year runs from July to June, a buffer of dry season on either side of when the rain might come. Other places just use a calendar year, from a cross-your-fingers-that-its-rainy January, to summer dryness, then rain again, we hope. We hope.

Different groups use different calendars: The National Weather Service in California used to use the rainfall year, but switched recently to a water year, following suit with the US Geographical Surveys and many other water and weather agencies. Hydrologists often like the rainfall year, because streams and rivers can run dry in October. Others prefer the simplicity of measuring the rain that falls during a standard calendar year, beginning in January.

I’m not sure which way I would choose, if I were doing the choosing. A water year gives you the best odds for good early numbers; then you’re just watching the clock run down unless there are some late-breaking summer storms. The rainfall year eases you in with dryness, then it’s strong in the middle. The calendar year perhaps is when we need a last-minute miracle. It’s probably a good thing I’m not in charge of a water agency, because I’d probably keep changing the system so that the numbers would look good—or at least, not so bad.

I do the same thing with time even when I’m not hoping for rain; I’m always choosing different clocks so that everything turns out the way I want. I don’t really make resolutions at New Year’s, but I do try to shape the year to come. But if that hasn’t gone well, I start again on my birthday, which falls on the spring equinox. Still not happy? I’ll try the fall, when school goes back in session, providing another chance to start over, whether or not I’m the one who’s getting new pencils and following the bell schedule.

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They’re All Just Waves

By: | September 22, 2025

I thought the latest sound clip from two merging black holes was nice but I’d heard this before and I wasn’t stunned. You can hear them spiraling in toward each other and merging — I can’t hear the ringdown which I assume is the merged entity shuddering. The first time I heard one of these clips, though, was the first one (above) recorded, ten years ago, and I was stunned to pieces; I even made it my ring tone. My ring tone clip:

My phone would ring, I’d explain happily to people who heard it that it was the sound equivalent — astronomers call it a chirp — of the gravitational waves caused by two black holes merging. People were generally polite about it.

The translation from gravity to sound by some thoughtful geek was natural: gravitational waves are pressure waves in space/time, just as sound is pressure waves in air. I like my old ring tone clip better than the latest clip — pretty sure the difference is just that the audio was stretched out to play longer, or something — because the inspiral and ringdown were clearer. Inspiral, ringdown, and chirp really are the technical astronomical terms, isn’t that nice, you don’t even need them explained.

Then I got a new phone with a new ring tone and forgot about it all.

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