Among the events lost in the start-and-stop non-rhythm of my writing here over the last few years was a significant anniversary–or, more accurately, three of them: the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth anniversaries of this website’s existence. I launched Between Urban and Wild as an author landing page in November of 2013. Between Urban and Wild…
When the idea I originally had for this post sputtered, I turned to my friend Lisa Hase-Jackson’s library of poetry prompts on her Zingara Project website. I’m not a poet, but I’ve kept journals for decades, and the “Journal Spelunking” exercise resonated—although I disobeyed the instructions and meandered down memory lane. My adaptation of the…
Amonda Marie Jones, 1940-2025 On November 3, 2000, my mother closed on the sale of her townhouse in Loveland, Colorado. “I’ve always wanted to live in a big city, New York or San Francisco,” she had told me, announcing her plan to move. “If I don’t do it now, I never will.” The date…
A run of wet weather the first week of May delivered two inches of precipitation on our place. This quantity might be shrug-worthy in some parts of the world, but in this semi-arid region, two inches can be a notable accumulation for an entire month. To receive that much moisture in seven days felt almost…
Although the title of this blog* bows to the influence of the urban, my efforts skew toward accounts of the wild. This is by design, since the preoccupations of everyday life have a way of steering our attention toward human (aka urban, in my scheme of things) concerns: social interactions, commerce, politics, and all the…
The break has been as overextended as it was unintended. Life intervenes; the necessary asserts itself over the preferred and chosen. It’s an old story, familiar and not particularly interesting. It would be easy enough to disregard the time elapsed, but in place of that, I offer a visual retrospective, a sampling of images to…
Twenty years ago, in March 2003, we were getting ready to move. Hubby Doug and I had spent the previous fifteen months living in “the cabin”: the little studio apartment adjoining the barn we’d built two years prior. We were in the process of settling down on our rural property in Colorado’s north-central Fremont County,…
The thing about the world as we’re coming to know it now—a world in the process of changing at timescales we can perceive from the relatively puny span of a human adulthood—isn’t just that extremes pile up. No, the thing is that these extremes cozy up to one another in bizarre and frankly disturbing ways.…
The question of how to live with the wind is answered with bitter resignation and gritted teeth. How to talk about the wind—without cursing—has different answers. I’ve been a volunteer observer for the National Weather Service for more than fifteen years now. My duties involve recording temperature and precipitation data; wind isn’t part of the…
That annual autumnal vow to make good on the dark months by focusing on writing has worn itself out. Restlessness starts winning over office-bound convictions this time of year. The stuff that most needs doing is inside at my desk, but my attention refuses to stay in the room. Some part of me wants to…