The other day, I drove up the canyon to “check if it’s still there,” or so I told my daughter on the phone as I accelerated. I didn’t have a question in mind as I drove. There’s always something waiting at home—unfinished work, loose worries—and lately there’s even...
I first learned to read the clock in abouts. Half past. Quarter till. Top of the hour. About nine o’clock. Before atomic time and the internet, even the first digital watches got ahead of or trailed exact time. You adjusted them by feel. A minute fast. A little slow....
A few weeks ago, I was with my family up the canyon, wandering along a shallow creek. Jack had already tried to jump the creek three times before we arrived. His boots were soaked, pants dripping halfway up his waist. The water was cold—mountain-runoff cold. But he...
I had just flipped a U-turn at the top of South Fork Canyon and started heading back down when I saw it—first only a lazy V of a large, dark bird gliding above the road. Its slow, effortless steadiness convinced me it was a raptor. I watched it, curious, until it...
Trees don’t grow from the ground—they grow from the air. Here’s how: leaves pull in carbon dioxide, and sunlight breaks the molecule apart, sending the oxygen back into the sky while keeping the carbon. Step by step, the tree stitches that carbon into sugars, then...
Madeleine L’Engle once borrowed this phrase for a story about time, light, and the battle between darkness and hope. I’ve borrowed it again because the title itself feels like a season—something on the move, as if the world were leaning toward winter. We speak that...
