Every spring the Bradford pear explodes in celebration of the season, raining white petals like confetti. Walking the greenway, seeing the confetti in the mud, this year’s celebration feels a little melancholy, like a birthday party no one came to. [][][] To slow the creeping infection of COVID-19, we’ve been asked to keep to ourselves, a kind of radical version of my own natural inclinations. Stay in your house as much as possible, and if…
It’s Saturday, March 14. I’m having a normal day. Coffee. Scrolling through posts on my phone — first in one app, then another, then again in the first app as if I hadn’t just done that very thing minutes before. It is the first normal day after so many not normal days that it feels decadent, like chocolate ganache in the form of minutes. The hours stretch out before me as if to tease me,…
I started smelling it on Wednesday, at first in quick bursts when the wind blew: The sour, thick stench of death somewhere in the yard. I was down by the driveway gate, putting a trash bag in the bin, and I noticed it and thought ew, something smells dead and got on with my business. The next day, I smelled it again. I was on the deck, watering plants, and it hit me like a…
Right now, in our wrought-iron security door, there is a complex network of webs built by funnel-web spiders. You can get a front-row seat to the action if you watch from inside the house. Sort of like an ant farm, but way creepier. I have counted eight, that’s right, EIGHT funnel web spiders in the network of webs, each perched on the mouth of his or her little funnel porch just behind decorative iron acorns…
Just sitting here covered in mosquito bites with wet hair (sweat hair) drying, acutely aware of just how much my air conditioning is killing the planet but unwilling to bump it lower than 74 degrees.
This is the kind of thing the sun does to the trees round about 6:30 in the spring in Tennessee. No filter. No editing.
When you get close enough to one of these things, you can see how much they look like some kind of alien cyborg with brightly colored armor. And they just look mean.
This little dude was just hanging out on the knob of the rocking chair the other day.
Holden and I are both covered in mosquito bites. I catch him sitting there with a puzzled look on his face, scratching the little red bumps on his legs, wondering why on earth such an annoying sensation would be happening and not going away. You got my blood, kid. Sorry. In addition to the ones on my legs and arms, I’ve got three of them on my back. My back! The small part, where the…
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