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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Snow was as appealing to me as to any kid growing up in the Chicago suburbs. In those pre-Internet days we huddled eagerly around the radio, listening to the long list of school districts that had canceled classes. In memory, at least, ours closed down only rarely, but when it did, that was occasion for celebration. And then we’d have to go shovel the damn...
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Usually I skip the nightly news. It’s not out of lack of interest, but because there are too many other things to do: work to catch up on, a kitchen to clean, lunch to prepare. Or it’s because it’s too cold out, or because once I do decide to pay attention the signs on grass and hard-packed dirt and sidewalk are simply too hard to catch, demanding too much...
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This week’s guest columnist is Peter Friederici. When I first moved to Arizona I vowed I would practice restraint. I won’t go there, I thought. Everyone does; it’s too easy, too obvious. Besides, there were any number of other canyons and peaks and desert vistas and high-mountain vales to explore, many of them spectacular, full of adventure, grand-ish. But...
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