Travel, even for reasons as simplistically goal-oriented as arriving on your mom’s doorstep to give her a hug for the first time in almost two years, puts a frame around a period in life. Whether for a few days or a fortnight or a month, your perspective shifts, your views change, and you’re forced out…
Like many Americans, Doug and I recently decided it was time to slingshot ourselves out of the near-to-home orbit we’ve kept to for the past year and a half. Breaking away was not irrelevant, but mostly we wanted to check in with distant family members. I needed to hug my Mom, to lay eyes on…
Thirty-five years ago, in June, 1983, I traveled to England as part of a 4-H exchange. I no longer remember exactly how I came to sign up for the program, but what’s clear in retrospect is how much that summer shaped my life. Even without the international component, the trip would have been monumental for…
I often say I write about my home place, but that’s not true all the time. The book project currently consuming my writing energy, for example, is about scientific literacy. (Though it might far afield from the natural history and personal observation focus of this blog, it turns out that scientific literacy is concerned with…
First things first: I am not a poet. As I mentioned in my last post, my writerly sensibilities are suited to essays, and that’s where I’ve long staked my claim. If I were to pursue poetry again, I suspect the results would best be characterized using the term my dad used for his writing, which…
In mid-October, I hit the road for Santa Fe, where I attended the Women Writing the West conference. After a socializing, talking shop, and attending sessions on craft and the business of writing with colleagues for a few days, my husband arrived and we spent an evening on the town before heading out on a…
Back in early June, I packed my too-heavy suitcase (too many books, too much paperwork) and left the horses and the garden and the weeds and the house in care of my husband. I was off to Vermont, to the verdant roll of hills thick with maple and birch, to woods skirted with hay-scented fern…
Even though we live in the sort of place most people escape TO, my hubby and I feel the impulse for a break now and then. Sometimes the change of place from this semi-arid ridge in central Colorado’s mountains is wet and coastal and occasionally it’s foreign, but often it’s a short city break. We…
When a delicate early-morning rainbow appeared late last week, I hustled to find the camera and take a picture. “We almost never see rainbows in the morning,” I was thinking to myself. And it’s true. Most of the time, rainbows here are captured in the beams of late-day sun, riding the tails of afternoon thundershowers.…
I don’t get out much. This is intentional and by nature. I enjoy the vast good fortune of a life that revolves around a home place in a beautiful natural setting. I work from home, and my husband and I continually strive to arrange our leisure time to include activities that do do not require…