I’m offended by the smoke that has invaded our valley. I’ve heard all my life that smoke follows beauty. Around a campfire, it’s an old joke. If the smoke drifts your way, you move to another log and let someone else become the punchline. This week there is no other...
I spend a lot of time outside—enough that I should probably worry more about skin cancer than I do. I’d always figured my coloring kept me on the safer end of it: brown hair, hazel eyes, skin that browns before it burns. Then someone close to me had a melanoma...
If someone asked for volunteers to run laps around the high school track, I’d be the last hand up. The reaction comes before the thought — flat, physical, immediate. Not fatigue. Something closer to boredom that has weight to it. The repetition, the grind, the...
I spent late Tuesday afternoon hiking up Bunnells Fork. It’s not a famous trail. Not particularly difficult. Just a good trail tucked away in a canyon that sees far fewer people than it deserves. Seventeen hundred vertical feet in two miles. I committed to that...
While I slept well the last few nights from cold temperatures, I couldn’t help but think about the orchards. That’s the trade this time of year. We rest better when the air cools off—windows cracked, deeper sleep, a sense of reset. But nearby, those same temperatures...
I haven’t written much the past few weeks. Not because life has been full. More because it hasn’t. Just not in ways that resolve into something clear enough to name. It’s been a stretch of in-between—one of those seasons that doesn’t announce itself but quietly takes...
