This past week, toward the tail end of a backyard shed refurbishment project that had gotten a little out of hand, I found myself urgently in need of a simple box of nails. They had to be two inches long, a size I was freshly out of because I had used the last ones in the existing box to begin the process of putting up trim around the doors and windows....
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Where I grew up, in the upper Midwest, summer evenings were long enough that as a young child I was often sent to bed before it was fully dark. It always seemed a cruel sentence to me, especially on the longest evenings in June when I could still catch the sounds of usually older kids shouting or riding their bikes or otherwise enjoying the mild evening...
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I know I am not alone in feeling that the past winter was a tough one in northern Arizona. Though it didn’t feature the epic snowpack amounts of 2023, it amounted to a good snow year—over 100 inches total in Flagstaff—and simply to a long haul of cold days, so that it wasn’t until well into April that we crested over 60 degrees. In March and into early...
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Based on my recent and careful study of the social media zeitgeist, I have come to understand that public confession is the best and most efficacious way to combat private demons. Yet I am ill-equipped to do so there, as my personal engagement with social media tends to be pretty half-assed; I am a dabbler rather than a deep diver. So I have to find some...
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It is hard to conjure up memories of childhood snows without a sneaking suspicion that they have been colored by the relentless mass-media momentum of the original Frosty the Snowman animated TV special, with its insistence on the sanctified magic of the winter’s first snowfall. But I know there are old family photos with that same vibe, images of cute...
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