It’s the Sunday morning after President Biden’s inauguration. A steady rain and predictions of snow find me indoors with a feeling of relief, if not quite contentment. I sit down and finish Frank Wilczek’s book Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality (2021). …

Strangely, I woke this morning thinking about a speech Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave at Harvard in the late 70s. I had written a paper about it for a Russian culture class and one or two sentences have stuck with me all this time. Solzhenitsyn wrote amazing fiction and his powerful words…

Coming into the living room early this morning I caught a flash of color through the branches of a cedar tree. I went outside and looked up. A tall cumulus cloud floated above me and the rising sun had lit its eastern face with pure gold, gold so thick and…

I punched the numbers into the microwave timer and pushed Start: 8 minutes, 46 seconds. And then I stood in my kitchen and watched the seconds tick down, thinking of George Floyd. I imagined how it felt to be lying in a street with a knee on my windpipe and…

I want you to know I washed my hands before setting them on the keyboard. Don’t worry. There may be viruses in your computer but they aren’t mine. And you might want to know that before I sat down I took out the trash and picked up my mail and…

The Alvord Desert is 12 miles long and 7 miles wide (19 x 11 km). Located in the far southeast corner of Oregon at about 4000 feet (1200 m), it’s an ancient dry lake lying in the rain shadow of Steens Mountain, a 9,733 foot (2,967 m) fault-block of basalts…

The Alvord Desert is 12 miles long and 7 miles wide (19 x 11 km). Located in the far southeast corner of Oregon at about 4000 feet (1200 m), it’s an ancient dry lake lying in the rain shadow of Steens Mountain, a 9,733 foot (2,967 m) fault-block of basalts…

As you no doubt know, this year marks the 400th anniversary of the introduction of slavery into the United States. I wanted to know more. …

I had my coffee on the porch this morning but the warming sunshine called so I did three loops around the lake, where there are still baby ducks to see, and goslings. They are growing fast, but still observant of their parent’s wishes. I watched a Canada goose family sail…