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.…
I suppose it’s the usual, this dropping the thread and vanishing from blog life for weeks…okay, months…at a time. Usual for me, anyway. It isn’t that I don’t think about posts, or topics for them. I do. Regularly, in fact. But I lack whatever instinct it is that compels the killing pounce, that impulse to…
In the background of all the unnerving events of 2020, a more private anguish has been unfolding for us. Back in early March, on one of the days I was rushing off to one appointment or another, I was driving past the feed boxes where the horses were eating their breakfast—except only one was munching.…
There’s a distinct pleasure in being able to make someone else happy. Sometimes their pleasure persists even as your own memories of the effort involved in said happy-making fade, tipping the scales of your satisfaction even further toward the positive. In the spring of 2018, almost a year ago now, I was getting started on…
I promised myself last spring it wouldn’t happen again: the summer, this year, would not spiral out of control. I would manage my time, balance my obligations, ride herd on my expectations. But the summer got away from me. Again. I can never figure out how this happens, can never reconstruct where, exactly, the days…
I am not, as I have mentioned in this space before, fond of the wind. In its rush to be elsewhere, air on the move unsettles my universes: the interior one as well as the world outside. The agitated limbs of the ponderosa pines outside the windows might well be emblems of the jittering of…