My back is to a life passed. A year, maybe more, in liminal space. Waiting. For a vaccine. For better therapeutics. For a political climate to shift. All the while, the actual climate turns against us. The waters rise in the East. Fires rage in the West. My back is to a life passed. Retirement, …
Continue reading ‘You Are Standing in a Doorway: California, Fall 2020’ »
Hagitude – Sharon Blackie Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River – Ellen Meloy The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest – Ellen Meloy The Anthropology of Turquoise – Ellen Meloy Map Drawn by a Spy – Guillermo Cabrera Infante Seasons: Desert Sketches …
The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere. —Barry Lopez, The Invitation The wind started in the early morning hours. Cold air from the north mixed with heat from the inland valleys and points south. As a result, the air was aswirl. It …
The Cal Falcons are hatching. Three fuzzy white chicks are tucked beneath their mother, Annie. A fourth egg may hatch soon. Annie dozes, white lids covering her open eyes. A stiff breeze ruffles her feathers as well as the debris scattered about the nesting box: feathers, bones, offal, the remains of songbirds. From time to …
Last night we heard a great thump at the side of the house. I went out in the raging storm in time to see a giant raccoon slip into the crawl space under our house. Someone had left the hanging door unbolted and this magnificent, intelligent creature managed to push the heavy wood flap up …
Last spring, I watched a mated pair of mocking birds, with clumps and long strands of grass in their beaks, drop by turn into the decorative tree in my neighbors’ front yard. When they were absent, I would sneak a peek, try to spot the nest, but I never could. It was well hid. The …
Dawn, Day Break, First Light. I’ve been reading these phrases my whole life. They are interchangeable and describe that hour or so of diffuse light as our place on earth rotates toward the sun, a period of increasing lightness while the sun still remains below our horizon. But it is there, the sun, and we …
My daughter has spent the year working on a small sustainable urban farm on California’s central coast. She prepared the land, planted, grew, and harvested food, tended to chickens and sheep, and two amazing dogs. This one in particular, Mr. Bluford Jenkins the Third–Blu for short–was her special friend. Blu was a guardian dog, bred …
Continue reading ‘A Year on the Land: the Walk and the Farm.’ »
California – John Mack Faragher About This Life – Barry Lopez Basin and Range – John McPhee The Talking Cure – Paula Marantz Cohen Desert Notebooks – Ben Ehrenreich Malloy – Samuel Beckett The Glass Hotel – Emily St.John Mandel The Sea of Tranquility – Emily St.John Mandel A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy …
Small Things Like These – Claire Keegan Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce Ulysses – James Joyce The World Broke in Two: the year that changed literature – Bill Goldstein Different – Frans de Waal Station Eleven – Emily St.John Mandel Reflections from the North Country – Sigurd Olson Saving …