A Hot Bath in April
This cold snap in late spring has brought much needed rain, and it has given me back my morning ritual. All winter, I rose early and drew a scalding bath first thing, smothering toast with apricot jam while water drummed in the tub. When the weather warmed then turned hot, I began sleeping beneath a...
Solstice
“Life used to be fun,” my mother says a few days before her eighty-ninth birthday. “Now it’s shit.” It’s hard to argue with her. Her memory is such that she asks me questions and by the time I answer, she’s forgotten what she’s asked. Our conversations take on an Abbot and Costello circularity. Suddenly disagreeable,...
Two Kinds of Light
At the northwestern edge of the United States, a left arm of the ocean thrusts into the continent up to its shoulder as if fishing for a lost wedding ring with its fingers. My home is at the inside bend of its elbow. Offshore, pods of orca whales hunt for seals and salmon, crabs crawl...
Leonids
November 18, 2001. The Leonid meteor shower. I wake up at 3 a.m., throw a wool coat over my flannel pajamas, put my fringed suede gloves on, and pull some blankets out of the linen closet. I’m quiet about it. I don’t want to disturb my husband. I go outside and drag a wooden Adirondack...
Place
I have been in this place before, in spirit if not in form. Perhaps I have been beneath white pine towers, the lowest limbs high overhead and an interwoven parquet of needles below. Only prickles of remote sunlight penetrate the branches to the ground and, without underbrush, the forest opens to gray vista and silence. ...
Romancing the Light
Nancy and I drive in her truck down Hardscrabble Road to Hollis Barrens. The sun casts an orangey-blue light as it sinks behind the adolescent mountains of western Maine as if it lives there. Along the road the foliage glows chartreuse, a heavenly illumination that makes you wish you were a landscape painter. This will...
High Country
This Idaho high country stunts most growth. Just outside the town of Salmon, buds of lupine and paintbrush, penstemon and pines, even the paddling mallard ducks grow tiny. Late in May, songbirds have yet to lay their eggs and winds still agitate Williams Lake — harsh habitat for creatures that adapt and even thrive. Trout...
Swimming with the Bull
It was midday when we topped the last rise on the trail with our noses aimed at the blue coolness of Moose Lake. Rane and I looked out over the small body of water and spotted the racks of a bull moose ten yards out from the near shore. “Is he eating?” Rane whispered, nudging...
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