Lessons From Mr. Nobody Against Putin

By: | January 26, 2026

In May of 2025, I went to Mountainfilm in Telluride with my BFF Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. We watched numerous amazing films, but there’s one that continues to haunt me, eight months later. 

Mr. Nobody Against Putin is a documentary filmed by Pavel (Pasha) Talankin. Here’s the synopsis published in the festival guide:

Pasha is a beloved teacher and event organizer at a small Russian school. In ordinary times, he is a mentor, prankster and nonconformist, known for hanging up democracy posters and offering his office as a safe haven for students who feel left out. However, after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine began, his responsibilities began to include facilitating daily state-sponsored propaganda events. Under the guise of his actual role as the school’s videographer, he documents footage inside classrooms, chronicling an institution abruptly transformed by new regressive laws, militarization, violence and oppression.

At the time we watched the film, we were only four months into this current administration and it felt like the world was crashing down. Rosemerry and I were similarly terrified and heartbroken by the destruction we were witnessing in our country, but we had polar opposite responses to the film. She was energized by it. I was left feeling even more despondent. 

A few days later, I called her to talk about the film.

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I like stuff

By: | January 23, 2026

My mother died at the end of June 2024, a few months after my father. They lived the last 39 years of their lives in a tidy but full house, surrounded by books, photos, treasures, and memories of travels.

It took a year and a half to transform the house from a cozy den of treasures to the white walls and bare wood I handed over to the new owners last week, and I had a lot of help. Before my parents died, I often wondered how this would go, and worried about it. I was going to want their entire five-bedroom-house’s worth of stuff, and it wasn’t going to fit in my one-bedroom apartment.

Some of it is here. (Now it’s a two-bedroom house, but it’s not much bigger than the one-bedroom apartment, and it has two people’s stuff in it.) Just above my laptop screen, on a shelf at eye level, are these items from my parents’ house:

  • A glass bird
  • A ceramic hoopoe ornament, like the hoopoe my mom and I saw in Turkey in 1998
  • A tiny bullfinch from Norway
  • Two frogs, carved of stone – my dad loved Zuni fetishes, tiny carvings by Zuni artists (one has the artist’s name on a sticker on the bottom)
  • A purple fuzzy critter from a Japanese animated film
  • A carved wooden sanderling from a craft fair in Maryland
  • Six of the dozens, maybe hundreds, of spinning tops that my dad collected
  • Two netsuke, one of a bird and one of a man holding a basket, that my parents must have bought in Japan in the 1970s
  • A chopstick rest with an adorable cartoonish snail

Nearby shelves hold more of their things: a round Tibetan box studded with coral and turquoise, two hand-carved wooden trolls from Norway, a seated wooden Buddha, a cuddly Welsh dragon. My dog is asleep next to me on a fuzzy blanket on a wooden armchair with a Tibetan-rug-turned-cushion – all from my parents’ house.

My parents liked stuff. I like stuff. Their stuff is here, with me. They are not.

I sometimes feel bad about liking stuff, and am very sensitive to other people’s judgment that I have too much stuff. All the talk about “clutter.” One person’s clutter is another person’s precious memory, made solid.

This shelf of tiny treasures all came home soon after my mom died. I’d hold one and remember its place in the house and feel a bit of love for the people who chose it, and bring it home.

In the year and a half that I was visiting a few times a week, looking at stuff, and leaving again, my feelings eventually started to change.

Sometimes I’d look at something again and find that it was just a thing. Time seemed to wear away some of the meaning. I’ve now looked at so very many treasures that every single one does not carry the same level of meaning. That glass bird in front of me, for example. I don’t know where it came from. I might even consider giving it away.

My feelings shifted in the kitchen, too. Right after my mom died, I couldn’t have dreamed of getting rid of any of her wooden spoons. Every now and then, I’d bring one home and add it to my own collection. A month or so ago, with my deadline closing in, I was able to pick up each remaining spoon, one by one, and decide its fate.

Two weeks ago, I sat on the floor in my parents’ empty box of a bedroom, held a tiny green and yellow ceramic turtle, thought, “I love this!” and happily packed it to go to the thrift store and find a new family.

On a shelf in my bedroom is a book by Richard Todd, a writer who died in 2019, called The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity. He wrote brilliantly about stuff and our relationship with it, how it’s gotten so cheap and available in the era of free trade, the feelings and memories it carries. I went digging through that book tonight for some wisdom to apply to my feelings about my parents’ stuff, and found this:

People interviewed on television after a natural tragedy ravages their world—flood or fire or landslide—say, ‘It’s only things, and things can be replaced. Thank God everyone is safe.’ And you admire them for this, as they expect you to, and their response is indeed right and good. But sometimes, hearing these ritualistic lines, I get an unworthy, even cold-hearted feeling. I want the things to be mourned. Many things, after all, survive us, and some deserve to, in part because they contain us.

Things contain us, he says. I know that having the carved stone frog in my life is not the same as having my dad. My dad is not his belongings. He lives in my memories and imagination, in what he wrote, and in the stories people tell. But I know how carefully he considered every decision in his life. I can picture him holding a tiny stone frog, setting it on the store’s glass counter, and bending over to examine it from all angles before deciding to take it home. The frog isn’t him, no. But if I didn’t have it, would I ever have imagined that scene?

Photo: Helen Fields, obviously

They’ll Be Back

By: | January 21, 2026

This is the worst time of year for me, for all the reasons. The weather, for one. In January, the length of time until warmth settles seems unbearably long. The prolonged dark (and yes, I know the days are getting longer now, but still) feeds on energy, saps the will to do things. The gray that weighs down the sky becomes a solid, unmovable thing. My mom died during February, and when I think of that month, all of us beaten down by the extra misery of watching her die during a Minnesota winter, I remember her propped in a chair by a window, wrapped in so many blankets we could only see her face (the cold always clawed its way through the glass), and her eyes were unfocused and we were losing her.

Getting through January and February is all about pushing back, fighting the long, hard sad. Even knowing February is short, you might need a little help. A simple remedy—obvious, really—is to dip into memories of those early days of spring that smell so good, or those early days of summer when the flowers are in full bloom. If you work at it you can get those images to continuously swirl through your mind like a computer’s screen saver. I’m sharing these photos because they are helping me do that right now, so I can limp along, day by day. When I drove past that gorgeous pink-candy poppy [correction: cosmos!] meadow last year, out in front of a winery in central Virginia, I had to stop and sit awhile at its edge, watching the stems lean and the blooms nod in a breeze I wished I could bottle. You know the kind.

Flowers evolved that way to lure the birds and bees, not us, but aren’t they just delicious? Can you remember being wrapped in the warmth that lets them grow? Doesn’t seeing them stretched out to the horizon take the edge off for a moment?

I hope so. I so wish in my mom’s final days she could have witnessed this scene instead of a dull wintry world. Winter wasn’t her thing, either.

If the photos bring you ease, please stay awhile, won’t you?


Life and Death by Mountain Lion

By: | January 19, 2026

I’m writing a book about mountain lions and it’s down to weeks, days, pages flying, margins scratched and scribbled, when news comes of a 46-year-old woman killed by such a cat a couple hundred miles from where I live. She’d been hiking alone on New Year’s Day, forensics consistent with a mountain lion attack, asphyxiation with no puncture wounds, very little blood, meaning the lion had her throat in its jaws and closed off her airway, one of its go-to kill tactics.

The winter has been dry, little snow on the ground where tracks would have offered evidence as to how this encounter played out, how long the two of them might have danced, the woman’s heart racing, the cat feinting from side to side, trying to decide how to approach its prey. When her body was found by two hikers, the cat was still present. They threw rocks and shouted and it fled. A physician in the pair ran up and found there was no pulse, the woman was dead, the first human fatality from a mountain lion in the state of Colorado in 27 years. 

I stop my work and sit still in the pointillist light coming into the house. Outside, high desert junipers and piñon pines press against the waking sky and I think of how scared she must have been when it happened. If there’s not an ounce of air left in your lungs and you’ve fought with everything you had, I like to think there’s a peace that comes over you, a resignation that must be a relief after a lifetime of working at being alive. It’s what you hear from those who survive drownings: in the final moments they don’t mind so much, it’s kind of pleasant, almost euphoric. This is how I make peace with the news of the woman’s death.

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Stuck in the Middle with Oystercatchers and You

By: | January 16, 2026

I feel like I’m always saying this, but: it was a weird start to the year. This year, I actually gave myself permission to *not* celebrate New Year’s, that is, I didn’t have to start a new program or a new calendar system, make a fresh start or be a new me. It was a relief. This week the pear trees on our street started blooming and I remembered this post. Tomorrow I’ll look for cormorants, and try to remember to celebrate the unsettled, unsettling beauty of the middle.

*

We often celebrate the beginnings of things, and the ends of things, but what about the middles? The middle can be a gray place, either boring or too eventful in all the wrong ways. That’s what this part of the year feels like to me– I’m missing the cozy days of early winter, where candles are a welcome novelty, when the early dark gives you reason to curl up with a book for an evening. Now, the days are a little longer, but not long enough for me to really enjoy the extra hours of daylight, only enough so that I feel like I’m struggling to keep up.

There’s a little bit of what could be hope out there—a handful of pear trees have started to push out white blossoms—but looming right behind them is an atmospheric river coming to grab the flowers by the fistful and smash them into the street. We’re just hovering here between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and sometimes it feels like this is the year the balance just won’t tip toward the light. No wonder Punxsutawney Phil has trouble predicting how soon spring will come, when, like the rest of us, the groundhog is stuck in the middle of winter. (The groundhog’s forecasts, NOAA reports, have been right about 40 percent of the time during the last 10 years.)

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It’s Still January

By: | January 14, 2026

Update, 1/27/2026: When I wrote this post, January was lying low. It has now risen from the deep with monstrous noises. So, a cold snap, fair enough. And then my boiler (which I think of as a furnace, no clue how wrong I might be) started not heating very well then not at all so I called 4 technicians over 4 days during which the home temp was around 60. Luckily the last tech was a genius who replumbed the whole damn thing as far as I can tell and the heat came back on. In time for the all-time record-setting snow and sleet and ice storm with temps around 20. I’ve never seen snow removal done by picking it up by hand and flinging it on the pile. The piles take up maybe 3 or 4 parking places and are head-high. The kids burrow into them, their little feet sticking out. The snowdrops are 8 inches under. I think my car’s battery is dead but my nerves are too shattered for me to check. The national horror continues. Big guns out, indeed.

A friend calls it Goddamned January and she has good reasons — intensive caregiving and difficult health decisions — to hate it. My reasons for hating it are also personal — my son and husband both died in Januaries — but I have case against it that’s general and over the years I have backed the case with evidence.

In 2020, I was getting over a bad bad cold and being comforted by snowdrops. In retrospect, even if that bad cold was not the just-discovered covid — which wasn’t even being tested for — I had no idea, none whatsoever, neither did anyone else, that January was just the beginning and things were about to get unthinkably worse, in fact, to blow snowdrops right out of the water.

In 2023 and 2024, January was getting tired of covid and fixing its wicked eye on infrastructure, that is, water pipes and gas lines and electric lines were blowing up and leaking and fritzing out left, right, and center, Baltimore was covered with snow and frigidity, and local freezing semi-isolated Baltimoreans hunkered down for an urban apocalypse, we were used to it by now. The neighborhood kids put on turquoise snowpants and dug themselves into caves; they made it seem like an option.

Currently January of 2026 is lying low, though it has lain low before and might be ramping up. Locally, it’s disrupting work schedules with broken websites and giving neighbors some kind of non-lethal but lingering flu. Nationally, it’s horrific, I ashamed of my country, I can’t even imagine people say these things and act like this, I’m ashamed of the whole damn species. The national horrificity could easily get local, we’re not immune and snowdrops and turquoise snowpants aren’t going to work any more. It’s time for the big guns.

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Ice Dreams

By: | January 9, 2026
U.S. military personnel at Camp Century, the “city under the ice” in northern Greenland, circa 1960. (U.S. Army photo)


At the height of the last Cold War the U.S. military burrowed into a glacier in northernmost Greenland and installed a nuclear reactor. The reactor was small—“experimental,” the army called it—and designed to power a base that had also been built under the ice. The base was called Camp Century, and it could house up to 200 scientists and military personnel in several tomb-like tunnels. While there wasn’t much to do in the “city under the ice” aside from work, sleep, and eat, its residents lived in relative comfort, considering, of course, that they were inside a glacier at the top of the world. 

There were showers and meals made hot by atomic power, there were bunk beds, a gym and a library. During the days, while scientists conducted research in one region of the base, engineers working in another began drilling down into the ice, to see how just how deep they might go. When I researched Camp Century last year for a piece I was working on, an ice base veteran named Austin Kovacs told me he’d never felt weird living there, so close to the reactor.

Every day, he told me, soldiers walked through the base swinging Geiger counters back and forth, like priests toting censers, listening for the uptight ticks or flat-out screech that would indicate trouble. But these sounds never came, and so the soldiers’ routine passage through the tunnels, the calm sweep of their counters in the darkness, came to feel like some kind of safety.


Lately I’ve been thinking a lot of that story. With Greenland in the news, with fresh threats and bullying pouring out of the White House each day. What it all says about who we are, what we’ll do. Would the U.S. really try to take Greenland, or buy it? Would we really invade? 

The president says America “needs” Greenland for security reasons, but as a few reporters have noted, old agreements between the U.S. and the Kingdom of Denmark (which Greenland is still part of) already allow the American military great latitude when it comes to defending itself, NATO, and Greenland. There were, during the middle years of the last Cold War, several American military bases and airfields on the massive island. Camp Century, with its sketchy reactor and sci-fi vibes, was merely the strangest of them. 

And yet no takeover or annexation was necessary for the construction of any of those bases—not even for the creation of a subglacial nuclear-powered one. Maybe it goes without saying that the Danes were not pleased to learn of Camp Century, and the Inuit, who make up the majority of the island’s population, were never asked for their consent. The U.S. simply went ahead and did what it wanted—what it thought would be cool. All this is to say that when the president suggests Greenland should be invaded or otherwise overtaken for “security” reasons, it is nothing more than a lie. And yet this word, security, has been repeated so often by politicians and the media that one day soon, if we are not very careful, it may become a chant, a refrain, reassuring as the soft tick of Geiger counter in a tunnel under the ice.


One by one most of America’s Cold War bases in Greenland were shut down as the threat of war with the Soviet Union lessened, or changed shape. In 1964 Camp Century’s nuclear reactor was fished up from the ice and hauled back to the States for burial somewhere out West. A few years later the base was abandoned. Much of the infrastructure—and a great many tons of radioactive wastewater, along with human and chemical waste—was simply left in place, to be slowly absorbed by the glacier. When Austin Kovacs went back to survey Camp Century a couple years after it was shut down

“… he found [it was] a total ruin. In a series of photographs he made of the base, one can see something like a mining disaster unfolding in slow motion. Tongues of snow spill down passageways. Steel structures collapse on themselves. Wood beams splinter like bones. The photos give form to the glacier’s overwhelming and otherwise invisible weight. Humans had been gone only a short time, but already there was the suggestion of an inevitable one-way journey—the debris being crushed, then swallowed, never to rise again.”


Kovacs and his survey team were the last humans to visit the site. After they left, the base vanished into the ice and was all but forgotten for half a century. When I first began writing about it, I thought of Camp Century as a sort of time capsule, hidden away beneath the ice, a cluster of artifacts waiting to resurface and remind us of our folly. 

Now I see the story as an American parable, one among many, all of them linked to the one we’re living through now. When I asked Kovacs if he’d ever told his children stories of his life under the ice he thought for a moment and said No. When I asked why, he couldn’t say.