Theo was not pleased. She parked herself in the doorway to the office, as though…
Lietuva 1: Finding Our Feet
Note to self: pay attention when walking, especially when on steps and curbstones. At the main post office in Kaunas, the last step ends with an extra bump, an inch-and-a-half drop to the paving stones. Didn’t see it. Fell on my face. Thank heavens the camera is okay....
The New York Times and the Ethics of Eating Meat
The New York Times sponsored a contest: “Defending your Dinner: An Open Contest for Hungry Ethicists.” I’m a sucker for contests, raffles and such, even though I never win. This effort met with predictable results. Because I was curious about when...
Patience, My Dogwood
Our dogwood has finally bloomed. She withstood the travails of flood, drought and blizzard, and constant cropping by deer, and this spring she blossomed, like some insecure girl crossing that seemingly impassable divide between challenged childhood and blessed...
Making a Green Velvet Carpet of Moss
When we signed on the dotted line and acquired the key to our new home in 2005—a new house in a new development—the rock-studded clay and steep slopes of our lot offered a tabula rasa. The woods beyond, a non-tidal wetland protected by the state Department of Natural...
Procreation, Politics and Power or What I Learned in High School that I Need to Know in this Election Year
A few years back I found myself on camera with Regis Philbin on the quiz show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” A few days prior to that encounter, a factoid learned when I was sixteen drifted into my brain during a trivia-cramming-induced stupor. The information that...
The Remains of the Deer
There is nothing that speaks to the collision of Suburbia and Nature like an encounter with the skeletal remains of deer inside the city limits. March came in like a lamb and the soft air lures us out to wander through patches of sunshine by creek and through woods...
What We Read
We—my Dear One and I—attended the 121st Turnbull Lecture at Johns Hopkins University on the evening of February 28. The speaker, John Irwin, a senior faculty member in the Writing Seminars, has just published a book on the poetry of Hart Crane and his topic was...
Retrospection 1: My Madeleines
Memories are not, I think, narratives we remember as much as impressions, images and sensations. In that I am in agreement with Proust. Such imprints seem, at least to me at this great distance from the events, a little arbitrary although not like events seen through...