Discovering What’s Possible at CERN

By: | July 30, 2025

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of visiting CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) with a group of STEM-curious high school kids. Our guide on the visit was Shirajum Monira, a tiny, dark-haired woman, who spoke gently as she walked us through numerous exhibits, experimental facilities and scientific devices. She spoke patiently and answered our questions in a way that showed a deep understanding of the science. 

One of the places Monira took us was the Control Center for ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). The ALICE project is studying strongly interacting nuclear matter that was prevalent in the universe’s earliest moments. Monira clearly knew a lot about ALICE and when I asked her how she ended up as a tour guide, she explained that she’s a researcher on the project. (I would later learn, via an internet search, that she was part of a team that won the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their work with the LHC.)

When I expressed my surprise that someone of her professional stature would be spending their time giving student tours, she told me that she volunteered to speak to students in hopes that she might inspire them to see possibilities for themselves. When she was 15, the age of the students in my group, she didn’t know any physicists, and hadn’t seen anyone from her background working as a scientist.

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Snapshot: Approaching fig season

By: | July 28, 2025

In 2021, I discovered figs, and I wrote about it here. Where have figs been all my life? I asked. A generous neighbor had a productive fig tree and over the next few Augusts, I made fig tarts (pictured above), fig cake (gift link to the recipe in the New York Times – you’re welcome), and fig-lemon preserves (recipe from my mom’s head. And I ate figs. My goodness. Figs are great.

But then this year I moved. There are fig trees here, too, just six miles south of my old place. As the end of July approaches, the fruit is bulging, still green, on fig trees in my neighbors’ front yards…but I’ve barely met any neighbors yet, and none that have offered me fruit. I’ve figured out where I can harvest some other things – a sidewalk herb garden with a sign telling passersby to pick what we need, for example. Several neighbors have rosemary bushes, and once I saw an older gentleman slow down, look around furtively, grab some basil from a front-yard bush, shove it in a plastic bag, and scoot.

I’ve tracked down one fig tree that isn’t on private property and I plan to walk by and check on it in the coming weeks.

In my old neighborhood, I knew where to find garlic mustard and persimmons, and who would give me mint from their garden (everyone! mint grows like a weed!). And I knew the buildings and the trees and the people, too.

I’m sure my old neighbor will let me stop by and harvest her figs, if it’s a good year. And some day I hope my new neighborhood can provide everything my old neighborhood could.

Photo: Helen Fields, obviously

My Corvid Friends-to-Be

By: | July 25, 2025

I’ve always wanted a crow friend, and this summer I’ve been making an effort. Each morning I put a handful of dog kibble on a paper plate and set it out on our back-patio table. I also ball up a piece of aluminum foil to add to the plate for decoration, although whether crows and other corvids (birds of the family Corvidae) actually like shiny objects, a common belief, remains to be proven. Then, I do my best rendition of a crow call (something between a caw and a honk, to my ear) to alert them to breakfast service, watching the skies for takers.

Our neighborhood has a resident flock of them—“murder” seems a little dramatic, though I suppose that’s the official, if antiquated, term—and they make themselves known daily. They start out calling from a distance mid-morning, moving closer via a long line of tulip poplars, before swooping down to see what’s what on the ground, chattering amicably (I think) all the while.

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Spirits at Home and Abroad

By: | July 23, 2025

I was recently in Japan with my high school graduate, a promised trip to a place I’d never been. My takeaway, besides humid summer heat poaching us in our own juices, is the wild green that took over anything humans left untouched. Hills are a chlorophyl riot, rugged canyons buried in canopies, creek after creek dancing through boulders and shadow. Even in the pulsing core of Tokyo, we’d find a temple and walk a trail through the woods getting there, washing our hands at a bamboo spigot as a form of purification.

I took an afternoon to walk alone because even with someone you dearly love, they need a break from you. I climbed stairs from a street in the small city of Takayama to a shrine, the route beyond the shrine skinnying into a leaf-and-dirt trail under a deciduous sky, insects clicking and buzzing around me. At the top of the hill was a clearing with a flat-faced boulder chiseled with kanjis. I used a translator app on my camera and I got back, “tree spirit.” It was a stone shrine to a tree spirit, which made sense, the traditional religion of Japan being Shinto, its tenets animistic. Spirits called kami are known to dwell inside of animals, plants, rocks, rivers, clouds, rain. If I were to follow a religion that aligned most with who I am, this would be it. When I took another translation pic, I got “block of wood” instead of “tree spirit.” At first I was puzzled, then I realized they were the same thing. A block of wood in itself would be a piece of a tree’s spirit. 

Back at home in Colorado, I was 87 days into 100 of walking animal trails in wild places, part of a self-imposed wildlife project I’m working on. At ponderosa pines I’ve been mashing my face into their trunks intoxicated with the candy store smell of terpenes under the bark. Tracks of mountain lions and bears brought me to my knees. This was my own form of worship, extensive interviews with field biologists mixed with time on the ground sniffing urine spots and measuring prints, talking with ants and clouds as if they were people. There’s no reason the practice of science and the belief that things have spirits are in opposition. Science will find that, too, if we look hard enough. 

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Zee Lady

By: | July 21, 2025

You might have read this post before. And you might have read it while listening to Jack Black sing “Peaches.“ And maybe you did both of these things while eating a peach!

But wait! The last time this post ran, in 2023, a kind commenter let me know that Western Colorado was a magical stone fruit extravaganza. And this year, if you were in Western Colorado from August 8-10, you could go to the very first Grand Mesa Writers’ Symposium. You could listen to readings and take workshops from wonderful writers including LWON’s very own Christie Aschwanden. And so you could read this post, and then sign up–and when you are there, you can eat a magical Colorado peach!

*

Confession time: I used to be a peach hater. What was wrong with me? It’s a question I often find myself asking, too.

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Resilience: Bug Nuts or Not?

By: | July 18, 2025

Last Monday, 7/14/2025, NPR ran an interview with a woman who lived through the flood on Texas’s Guadalupe River, a terrible story and I paraphrase:

The flood blew down her back door and filled the house, water pressure wouldn’t let her open the door to her 95-year old mother’s bedroom, so she had to get out and leave her mother there, she thought her mother was dead. Turns out her mother had floated on her mattress up to the ceiling where there was an air pocket, and when the flood receded, the mother on her mattress floated back down, quite alive.

But the woman’s house and everything else was gone. And I’m thinking, after that experience I don’t see how she’s upright. And then she says she won’t move away: “I love it here. I’ve made a life here, you know? And this is my community . . . Look, it’s gorgeous.” And I think — with admiration, respect, and sympathy — that is just purely bug-nuts.

Once you know that your home is in disaster’s cross-hairs, wouldn’t you leave your home? go find a better home? In 1811 and 1812, enormous earthquakes hit New Madrid, Missouri and spread to the surrounding states; a man who lived through it swore he’d move his wife and family to Indiana and he did; and two years later he wrote, “We did not lose any lives but we had aplenty troubles. As much as I love my place in Kentucy – I never want to go back.”

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On old dogs

By: | July 16, 2025

I am not a person who grew up with dogs. Taiga—my first and only—came into my life when I was 29, an adventure companion that outshone all others. She is the muttiest of mutts, small and trim with foxy, rabbit-soft ears. Until recently, when people asked me what kind of dog she is, I would simply say that she’s “the best kind.” Then a lady at the post office exclaimed that Taiga was, in actuality, “a special tiny wolf,” and by Jove, that lady had it right. I introduce her properly now.

Taiga is north of 15 these days, and I’m well north of 40. She has been here for me through so much, the confidant and keeper of my good and bad times, the head hugger and delight bringer of my homecomings. She is more present through my days than any person in my life. The boyfriends that have come and gone—those I wish had stayed and those I was glad to see leave. The dear friends nearer and farther, in loose or close touch. Even my family, each of whom I adore.

Taiga is my constant. She carries all our shared miles and mountains, the states and towns and cities where we’ve lived. The stars we’ve slept under, the lakes and rivers where we’ve dunked, where she’s swum in circles after fish she had no hope of catching. The cowshit and chickenshit and god-knows-what-else that she’s rolled in. All the people we’ve loved, together.

Our story is one story, is my story. I used to tell her that she wasn’t allowed to die first, and that I planned to live past 80, so she should be prepared to stick around for a while. But Robert Frost had it right; nothing gold can stay.

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Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Scopes Trial by Screaming Like a Furious Monkey

By: | July 14, 2025
Fossils from the Burgess Shale, because creationists would definitely hate the Cambrian Explosion. (Credit: Brooks Hanson)

The Scopes Monkey Trial was held 100 years ago this month, but it feels like just yesterday. Actually, it feels like today; it feels terrifyingly like tomorrow. The theocrats are ascendant, friends, and their rejection of evolution is tied to all the other monstrosities they’re imposing on public life. Theodosius Dobzhansky said that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. And nothing in the right-wing, white nationalist, misogynistic, transphobic, fascistic effort to reject reality makes sense except in light of the battle over creationism and evolution.

John Scopes was a teacher in Tennessee who broke the state’s law against teaching evolution. His show trial popularized the science of evolution, but it also energized the fundamentalists and other conservatives who opposed teaching science in science class. 

You know who hated evolution, then as now? Racists. The Ku Klux Klan was a big supporter of anti-evolution laws. White supremacists today insist that race is a biological reality, despite abundant scientific evidence that racial categories are social constructs (and we’re all just great apes anyway). One alum of the anti-evolution Discovery Institute (remember them?) supports racist ideas about intelligence and led the fight against schools teaching about the history and consequences of racism.

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