It’s like living in a light bulb, with the leaves Like filaments and the sky a shell of thin, transparent glass Enclosing the late heaven of a summer day, a canopy Of incandescent blue above the dappled sunlight golden on the grass. -John Koethe “Sally’s Hair” Reading: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s powerful, moving, exquisite new book, Between …
“It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.” –Maud Hart Lovelace Betsy-Tacy and Tib Watching: The riveting BBC screen adaptation of HIlary Mantel’s Wolf Hall that recently aired on PBS. It’s a brooding, visually dark, and sumptuously rendered piece of historical political intrigue with an all-star cast …
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” ― George Orwell, 1984 Reading: Tom Kizzia’s “Moving to Mars”, a fascinating piece on NASA’s ongoing isolation studies in attempt to prepare for the psychosocial challenges of long term isolation that would be part of any mission to Mars. I’ve always …
I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house, my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box set up on pilings, shingled green, a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener (boiled with bicarbonate of soda?), protected from spring tides by a palisade of–are they railroad ties? (Many things about this place are dubious.) I’d like to …
Don’t they look lovely? A little bit exotic? I know I’ve seen them before, sitting in baskets at the farmers market, pale and papery, like tiny tomatillos or ornamental lanterns. I knew they were commonly called ground cherries, and they always seemed intriguing, but somehow, until this morning I had never eaten one. I was …
If I ever doubted that garlic is a member of the lily family, I am a skeptic no longer. The bulbs tend to garner the bulk of the attention when we think about the stinking rose, but these lovely “garlic flowers”–as the sign at the farmers market identified them–caught my eye with their crooked necks …