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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 [...]

I have avoided writing about overtly political topics in this blog, mostly because it’s divisive and I need space for other aspects of my writing life. Satire is a reliable outlet for frustration, angst, and general world-weariness, but as I try to digest the events of yet another exhausting week of political crisis in the first days of 2020, satire serves neither this topic nor [...]

I subscribe to a daily email roundup and summary of local environmental news called the Salish Sea News and Weather. Yesterday’s installment contained a story from Seattle’s KOMO News called “Got squid? Why officials say you should catch and eat it out of Puget Sound.” It went on to say, “Forget fishing for salmon. Puget Sound crab pots are so passé. Squid is in.” The [...]

I'm following up on a previous post on the meaning of home and how laughter helps define it, and on another post on the science behind the benefits of laughing. Here’s an example, one of many, of how the weekly round table of six friends who meet at our local pub, drove, in less than a minute, a perfectly good conversational topic right over the cliffs [...]