Last night I took a crowded elevator to the hundredth floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Not rattled or shaken, we were propelled to the top in 52 seconds, like being beamed up. Doors opened and we all poured into a high-windowed space looking onto the electric-white boroughs of New York City. A revolving door turned us onto an outdoor viewing platform where hundreds gushed and posed at angled glass barriers tipped away from the building where one can lean over the edge more than a thousand feet above the ground. The Empire State Building with its colored spindle was not diminutive, but it ..read more

We attended our first childbirth preparation course last week, Pete and I. It was 2.5 hours long, on Zoom, and would have made an excellent drinking game (drink every time you hear the word blood! Or mucus!) had I been drinking. Instead, we just watched it in bed on my laptop, passing a block of cheddar cheese back and forth while Pete drank enough whiskey for both of us. The instructor (Linda? Laurie?) flipped through slides on the various Signs of Labor and Stages of Pregnancy at a brisk clip. All the titles were capitalized, like biblical plagues or Liam Neeson films: The Breaking of the B ..read more

Did you see the stars come out during the eclipse? Did the colors change in a Magic Hour kind of way? Did darkness fall without long shadows, and do you miss the experience already? I’m here to tell you there’s another way to see that, and you get Tom Hiddleston in with the bargain. Growing up, I would watch nature programs with my father. If the film crew got really fancy, they might include an infrared camera shot of an oasis at night. Blurry animal shapes hunkered down next to the water, lifting their snouts warily in search of lions. It was a thrilling glimpse into a hidden world. Now, wi ..read more

I don’t know why this came out in “verse,” but here it is. I’m no poet, but I had fun regardless. And if you read it right, it really does scan! Upon my feeder yesterdayA cowbird male did land,Brown-headed with his body coalAt first glance not too grand.But then I took the time to learnThe story of his kind,I peered more closely, read some factsThat truly changed my mind.Named for chasing cattle herdsTo nab bugs in their wake,They thrive in meadows, grass, and fields‘cross these United States.A male’s song’s like a water dropA female’s more a chatter,Both voices seem to do the jobWhen someth ..read more

Eclipse The earth moved to follow his smile, but she stood aside, let the planet pass. Her signs were subtler: quivers of little stars, the sucking dark depths of the ocean. Young women turned their faces to him like flowers, hoping for a laugh, an accidental touch, and men labored hard to prove their worth to him. She spun silently in the night. The weight of the world stood between them. But every so often, in the emptiness of space, when another kind of gravity pulled them together, he’d lay his golden head on her shadowed breast and sob. * Eclipse drawing by me (2024 ..read more

In the week leading up to a once-in-a-lifetime total solar eclipse, we bring you a daily lineup of eclipse writing from the People of LWON. Richard had a plum gig in the 90s when magazines used to send us places, so he caught an eclipse from a unique vantage point. Posted in 2017: On Monday the world gets another look at a total eclipse of the Sun. Viewers in the United States will be especially fortunate. See the map immediately below…and then please continue to scroll to a map showing the path of a previous solar eclipse—one that I witnessed for myself in 1999. I wrote about that e ..read more

In the week leading up to a once-in-a-lifetime total solar eclipse, we bring you a daily lineup of eclipse writing from the People of LWON. Craig missed out on the last eclipse, reminding us that the moon is not the only important thing under the sun. “Eclipse” Chalk, Blackboard 42″ x 70″ 2009 Adam David Brown I’m not at the totality today, and it’s been gnawing at me. Between 1 and 7 million people are estimated to witness this swath of darkness across the middle of North America from coast to coast. I live about an eight-hour drive away, and I’ve heard totality is a mystical experi ..read more

In the week leading up to a rare total solar eclipse, we bring you a daily lineup of eclipse writing from the People of LWON. Cassie and her husband Soren captured a remarkable recording last time, memorializing Baby’s First Eclipse. A couple of months ago, I hatched a really good plan. My husband and I would drive six hours into the path of totality without our two-year-old daughter. We would have a relaxing car ride, followed by some nice meals at fancy St. Louis restaurants. But then I realized that no one was available to watch our two-year-old, so we had to take her with. I cou ..read more

In the week leading up to a total solar eclipse, we bring you a daily lineup of eclipse writing from the People of LWON. Helen’s phone died before the last eclipse, and thank goodness for that, because now we have her charming drawings to capture its spirit. I’m writing this from a traffic jam on I-95. When we were choosing days on the schedule for Eclipse Week, nobody wanted the responsibility of writing a post the day of the eclipse. Because I have an overactive sense of duty, I signed up for this post, then joked that I’d be writing it on I-95, from the world’s worst traffic jam ..read more

In the week leading up to a rare total solar eclipse, we bring you a daily lineup of eclips writing from the People of LWON. Our Christie and her father, Friend of LWON Dee Friesen, have a long tradition of eclipse appreciation, the last decade of which is shared here. From the 2017 eclipse: You may have heard that there’s a total solar eclipse happening on Monday. I have known about this event for at least five or six years, which is how long my dad has been planning for it. Dad already had me pretty excited for the eclipse, but after reading David Baron’s delightful book, American Ecli ..read more