Sometime around last Christmas, it became apparent that I would have a window of time this summer to dispense with as I saw fit. Things playing out as they usually do during the holidays, I began to plan for the best use of that time that I could imagine: a hermitage far from mankind […]
I’m pretty okay with words. But for some reason, when it comes to plant names, my mental dictionary has a gaping hole. The best gardener lingo I can muster is “forsythia,” and I only remember that because I face a wall of it every time I look out my front window. There is a small, […]
In the most romantic day of the year, February 14, The New York Times published a love letter to me. It moved me, pulled at my heartstrings, and set flight to butterflies in my stomach.
The title of it was, “A Collapse of the Amazon Could Be Coming Faster Than We Thought.”
Awe, Times. You […]
It’s time to confront the great myth about Christmas.
No, not that one.
The one about it being white. Perhaps the most persistent and potentially misleading lie we tell about Christmas is that it is accompanied by snow. Despite the increasing rarity of an actual White Christmas like the ones Bing Crosby “used to know” in […]
It is 5pm on a Monday, and I am trying to decide if it is too dark to split another piece of wood. I’ve been at it for half an hour, quartering log after log from the pile I amassed over the summer when I felled the first of a dozen dead ash trees in […]
The “high road” is one of those brilliant rhetorical turns of phrase that simultaneously depicts a useful metaphor and manipulates an audience. Politicians love to tag legislation with similar flourishes that practically guarantee passage of something like the No Child Left Behind Act, because who could possibly vote to leave a child behind?
Similarly, no one […]
A first, stumbling step beside the coffee table. A wobbly turn of the pedals. An unexpected lurch when you step on the gas: the great milestones in life – and in human history – involve transportation, but none more so than the initial steps taken by […]
Many tear-sodden, crumpled papers ago, I wrestled with the geometry of diagramming sentences (yes, I went to Catholic school). A two-word sentence was simple enough, all horizontal and vertical, but when things went all 45 degrees, and sentences became complex and compound, my diagrams resembled a thicket […]
Right about this time, 17,000 years ago, the Main Street distribution area was covered by hundreds of feet of ice. From the Housatonic to the Hudson, South Taconics to Catskills, the Laurentide Ice Sheet shaped our area at literal glacial speed, scouring bedrock and depositing minerals in places that would determine the character of this […]
In most publications, this is the part of the article that usually includes a disclaimer meant to either dissuade the reader from engaging in the about-to-be-described activities or at least distancing the writer or publication from any kind of liability for the reader’s suggestibility and – let’s […]