The last year has been foundation-shaking for me. I went from two parents to zero in less than seven months and I’m trying to figure out exactly how life works now. Soon after the second parent died, my region was plunged into a miserable heat wave that lasted more than a week and made it hard to do anything other than sit inside and feel bad and wonder if this is just what summers are like now, if this is our new climate, and here I am, facing it parentless. But the heat wave went away and the other evening it rained. I sploshed barefoot in the temporary stream down the middle of the alley ..read more

An American: You guys have something called Flying Ant Day. Is this some kind of national holiday?  A British person who is tired of ants: I can see how you’d get there, given the past 14 years of British politics. Quite the opposite, though: it’s the summer day we all dread because unlike other commemorative days, Flying Ant Day is always a surprise. For a few weeks leading up to the event, British publications are stuffed with headlines including “When is flying ant day?”, “Is it flying ant day?” and “Flying Ant Day has arrived“. Okay but I just looked online and it says Flying Ant Da ..read more

Based on real adventures in aging. Of which I hope to have more. (Feel free to add your own.) It really IS a solid hose reel. ———————————————————- Getting older is hilarious. Or, at least, that’s the best way to think about it. Here are more signs that time is a damn freight train and your foot it stuck in the tracks. You can no longer see the instructions on your statin bottle. You need a nap after going to Home Depot. You consider that trip to Home Depot an outing, and you announce after that you’re done for the day. Friday night is laundry night. Saturday night is laundry-folding night. You ..read more

It’s hard to know what to say, every twist and turn becoming a knot. Forces are crashing, glass flying. I’m up in the mountains where ancient volcanoes choked themselves to death, then eroded for 30 million years into the throaty remnants of a Colorado hotspot. Forests have grown on the rubble and I’ve been walking through some lately that feel healthy, getting enough respite from droughts that their leaves and needles are many and green. Pine cones are falling and I stop to watch them.  The cones that catch my attention are from ponderosa pines. Light and woody, the size of softballs, t ..read more

This week came with heartening news in the frog world. An Australian study showed that if you offer frogs a sauna in a greenhouse, it allows them to recover from the fungal disease that has played a role in 90 species extinctions so far. The greatest loss of biodiversity ever attributed to a single disease, the fungus in question is Batrachochytrium dedrobatidis, not-so-fondly-nicknamed Bd, and it infects the skin, needed in frogs for breathing. This causes electrolyte imbalance and eventually fatal heart attacks. Bd lives in the soil and water and threatens amphibians worldwide. Sadly, we ca ..read more

In my last post, I extolled the virtues of our BirdCam, a delightful contraption that, this spring, provided a fun little window into the lives of our backyard buntings, orioles, and other winged neighbors. Alas, summer has since arrived, migrants have moved north and upslope, and now BirdCam feeds us a dull diet of House Finches and House Sparrows. But! Last week, it did deliver us this: Yep, that’s a Blue Jay — an iconic eastern bird, flitting through the mountains of central Colorado. It isn’t the first we’ve seen; we’ve had “Blue Jay” on our whiteboard of bird observations since last sprin ..read more

This was first published October 21, 2019 but the universe hasn’t changed much in the years since. I mean, a few stars may have come and gone but on the whole, the universe is too big to change that fast. But we, at least we in the US, we’ve changed though. We seem to have lost our good nature, we are in a frenzy of dire and bad thoughts: about political disaster, the apparent decline in national rationality, godawful heat and floods and storms and fire, and honestly every morning I have to haul myself out of the deepest despair over our decay and dissolution. This post is an unexpected antid ..read more

This is from April 17, 2017. Since then other irreplaceable neighbors have moved away, in particular, two who were my age, a little older, who moved into retirement places. I miss them because of their own lively, interesting, lovely selves but also because I felt they were a protection, that as long as I could see their cars out front and their lights on, things were going to be ok. Like, they’d lived it, knew how bad it could get, and still knew how to make things ok. I still see these beloved neighbors, of course, just like I still see the neighbors in this post and even if their campfires ..read more

I was at the Seattle Pride parade last weekend, where I saw multiple people wearing t-shirts that said “Y’all means All.” It reminded me of how my husband got me using this gender-neutral, inclusive word. This post first ran a few years ago, and it’s as relevant as ever. Most people don’t adopt a new manner of speech in their 40’s, so when my husband recently started using the phrase “y’all” I wondered what was up. It wasn’t like his Swiss parents taught him to use this slang, and he’d grown up in Colorado, where y’all is uttered only by Texas transplants. After hearing him say y’all for some ..read more

Almost 15 years ago I traveled to a polar ice sheet with two key researchers who have since passed away. First, José Rial, who I followed to Greenland, was taken by cancer. His death was followed by his friend Konrad Steffen, one of the great Arctic ice scientists and explorers, who fell into a crevasse just outside the camp where I’d spent time with him. This post, which ran in 2020, is a toast to them. On the Greenland Ice Sheet I sat at a circular table in the cook tent of a seven-person research station. Wind banged and thrummed outside. A storm had been on us for days. After going out to ..read more