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How's everyone doing? Are you managing to find the nuggets of good stuff hidden in this year's hazardous waste dump? I've picked up my rapidograph pens again and had fun doodling these cartoons, which I give to you in hopes it'll elicit a giggle or two. Please feel free to suggest more "If 2020 was a..." ideas in the comments. Meanwhile, be safe and stay [...]

Mist, rain, chill, repeat, it’s Juneuary. Mossy roofs, rain gutters leaf-bulged, a smell of drowned earthworms, the slap of agglomerated raindrops under a maple tree, patter like white noise, chuckling drains and scalloped rain-waves on pavement. A ’42 Chevy in a shed, a deep-throated ship’s horn in the Strait. The downwind glide of a seagull under the weight of wing-water, the heavy upwind gull-work of [...]

We all know the basics because we just saw the video. Two security guards who worked together for 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 to [...]

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 [...]