The red cabbages in the garden are fattening up nicely with the monsoon rains—knock on wood, right now!—which pleases me because as someone who grew up in a household of German background, I look forward to stewing them up with some apples and red wine and vinegar, and some cloves or a bay leaf depending upon mood, to create a nice big pot of what they...
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Sometimes a rock is just a rock. And sometimes it’s something more. I had the occasion to experience a lot of rocks last week, in Labyrinth Canyon on the Green River in Utah. It was a hot and buggy time for a river trip, but our small party was driven by vacation schedules and buoyed by ignorance: of the five of us, only I had been there...
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It is the daily pileup, delivered by someone I never see but sometimes hear when I am awake early, a light thump! that is as good an indicator as anything going on in the sky that dawn is about to come. There it is, the daily paper, and I know I will sound like an old fart here when I write that it is how I prefer to get the day’s news even though once in...
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Letter by letter, word by word, a story expands from the smallest of kernels into something more, reminding me when the work is hard and grinding of that annoyingly perky gardening song: inch by inch, row by row, gonna make my garden grow. And it is springtime, the time of year when every element of life seems attuned to new purpose: through the window the...
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Toot—toooot goes the whistle every night, a clean repeat that after you’ve heard it a few times ever after has to be a pair, just like Romeo and Juliet, or peanut butter and jelly. The twin tones echo a few times off Cherry Hill and Mars Hill, fading into the background hum of the city just before the sound of the train itself comes into earshot. A minute...
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