Dragonfly season here is a show of grace; color; delicacy. The insects rise and pause and land with an ethereal weightlessness we don’t associate with the much larger dragonflies of our youth in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where they stood on air and rumbled about in our classrooms at school, entering and leaving freely through the open doors and unscreened windows. During the warm months, which seemed to last most […]
I was sitting on the front step at first light, just as the robins were beginning to sing, when I noticed the soft, blurry shape of an animal a few feet away under the lacy green maple. Was it a cat? No. It was a raccoon. I stood up. Surprised to find someone so near, it quickly moved away. I sat down again. More light. More robins. More light-robins. More […]
Warm days, clear nights. The junco babies are frantic with hunger, and keeping both of their parents busy bringing food to the nest. The early-morning watering ceremony continues. Frantic, yes — but when evening comes all grows quiet and the birds sleep through the night, their tiny bodies resting and growing until dawn wakes them again. Circadian perfection will guide them all of their lives, while we torture and punish […]
Vivid blue sky and great white clouds — not too warm for an afternoon walk, but far too bright without the shade of a wide-brimmed straw hat; temporarily blinded, though, by a stretch of new sidewalk. An impromptu soup of garlic, onion, purple kale, potato (one of which was baked yesterday, the other raw) and white kidney beans (cannellini, it says on the can); olive oil; salt; pepper; a generous […]
For every drop we waste, there’s someone somewherewho would weep at the sight. Tears, too, are made of water. Silver Falls State Park July 8, 2022 . [ 1484 ]
In what seemed for a time a kind of dance or wrestling match, I moved the split-leaf philodendron from its white-stained, root-bound clay pot to a much larger, lighter, clay-colored plastic pot. Unfortunately, I had to break the clay pot with a hammer in order to take out the plant — except that technically, when I was done hammering, the philodendron was already out. The operation was performed next to […]
Cloudy, calm, sixty-one degrees. Twice during this morning’s run, I was met with the scent of star jasmine, and once with that of a cigarette. Then someone, perhaps unable to bear the dark and the quiet, or the idea of facing another day of meaningless, underpaid drudgery, set off a loud firework somewhere to the east. The silence, though, didn’t mind; it held the noise close until it died in […]
This year on Mother’s Day, our eldest son arrived with a large hanging flower basket he bought from someone who’d set up a display on Highway 99E a little north of the town of Corvallis. He’d been hiking and running in the woods near there and was on his way home when the display caught his eye. The man had stuffed just about every plant imaginable into his baskets — […]
So many things live only for a day — flowers, insects, rain, and sometimes people — yet see how different, how strange the world would be without them. Love it all. Never look away. To embrace, rather than resist, the ephemeral nature of sharing one’s thoughts online. Helped, and also haunted by, mechanical memory. The neat, efficient archive (see cemetery rows, honeycomb) is for oneself, for the idle many, the […]
Like April, and again like May, June has been a cool, cloudy, rainy month — much more so than what is considered normal, but of course normal is nothing but an average of the dry years and the wet years taken together. Last June, for a stretch of several days, we had to cover our cucumbers and dahlias with sheets to protect them from record high temperatures, which registered, at […]
William Michaelian 