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We all know the basics because we just saw the video. Two security guards who worked together for seventeen years get into an altercation on the street: one is a police officer, white, and the other is a man, black. Four officers total, the black man handcuffed and prone, the white officer kneeling on his neck as he begs for air, a crowd begging them [...]

It always snows here at the end of April, big white drifts of cherry blossoms, like little spirits. Lower branches go first, then uppers, nodding at a teasing sou’easter as masses of pale corollae go slant-petaling down past grizzled treebark. You never see the moment of tremble and separate, you just see them fly. April is a time of flowering trees and daffodils. In May, [...]

Once, deep in an Alaskan winter in the abyss of a post-divorce-induced depression, I spent an entire Saturday sitting in the living room of my rented postwar cottage, rocking absentmindedly in a creaky chair, dog in my lap, staring through small frosted windowpanes at feathers of hoarfrost growing outward on tree branches, like polar bear fur. It wasn't my intention to sit there all day, [...]

Seven years ago this week I was on an island off the coast of New Zealand, walking twice a day up a small steep mountain to care for an abandoned endangered baby parrot in the wild. I talked to it, gave it water, and on the fifth day it ate its first solid food, a high-protein banana-fig-mash mix that I made fresh every day. Then [...]

…and the patrons immediately realize the danger and leave. I hope whoever says, “May you live in interesting times” is given the job of White House Tweet Control. Or perhaps Consigliere to the Attorney General. I’ll take boring times over these adrenalin-draining times any time. The stench horn of national news that once stunned us now barely registers as we long for quaint bygone comforts, [...]

In her poem Blackbirds, the poet Julie Cadwallader Staub wrote, "...and when I turned my face upward / I saw a flock of blackbirds / rounding a curve I didn't know was there / and the sound was simply all those wings, all those feathers against air, against gravity..." She asked, how do they do that? And then: "If we lived only in human society / what [...]