Handsome is as handsome does

I’ve got to stop meeting like this, after dinner, full and somnolent. Though it’s Saturday, and by modern consensus Saturday does not operate with weekday discipline. Anyway, I was looking over the beds in my idea garden — Do you have an idea garden? That’s a more celebratory name for the stack of slips of […]

The psychology of Friday 23 September

It is Friday night. I am reviewing my week’s flow with distaste — I believe I used the word “fail” to my colleague at the library — while scrolling through Facebook, that source of endless mild diversion. It’s not that I wasted time this week. I might have; there’s a two-hour stretch of plantain chips […]

Label-maker

The seats at the lunch table were empty but adjacent. The only thing we knew about each other was that we both had come to this conference that emphasized community, but we came because we liked their ground rules. So we set about finding common ground.  We disclosed the usual sorts of low-key things, I’m […]

What I brought home

I really enjoy going away. When my girls were small, it had me feeling out of sync with my culture — I loved to leave them and My Sweetie behind for a weekend…or a week. I’m not much for calling home, either, never have been. When I climb out of my dailiness, I’m out. Until […]

New, known, and familiar

I’m riding down the road in the dark again. It’s the half-hour before sunrise, and already light is dissolving the black bowl of night. The dark tips of lodgepole pines are separating from the paler grey of sky. I am scanning for elk on the roadside; yesterday we nearly had an “encounter,” and that’s enough […]

#FindYourPark

For the past couple of days we have been on guided tours, guests of knowledgeable people. Expats, in a way, from the rest of the US, freed to spend half each year showing visitors the country they love. I’m glad we’ve taken the time to listen to them. Having two tours in a row plus a […]

Geyser Time :or: Berry redux

I’m sitting beside a set of geysers. We are at the beginning of the activity-window for the predictable one of the set, so it will probably squirt within the next hour or so. Note: “probably” and “or so.” My Sweetie gets up, prowls the perimeter trail a bit. I’m looking through the steam at the […]

Eating Together / Li-Young Lee

In the steamer is the trout seasoned with slivers of ginger, two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil. We shall eat it with rice for lunch, brothers, sister, my mother who will taste the sweetest meat of the head, holding it between her fingers deftly, the way my father did weeks ago. Then he […]

Slow down and adjust: how hard can it be?

In our own time Wendell Berry has written eloquently of pulling off the high-speed world of an American interstate highway into an Appalachian campground, and needing more than an hour to slow down and adjust to the rhythms of his own body and the world close at hand. –Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me, p220 This […]