TAKE A WALK

Walking is healthy exercise. Taking time out from your busy life is mentally healthy too. A website recommends planning a 30-minute walk this weekend because "here in the age of binge watching and sedentary smartphones, that we all could stand to move around a bit more." They aren't wrong about that. They have three pieces of …

DROWNING

I told a friend about my favorite metaphor for a successful relationship. [Bear with me because it's entirely backwards and if you have not spent time on a Pacific shore it will make little sense.] You wade into the surf, just a little way in to the middle of your shins because the tide is …

MEMORIAL

When Gary was a little boy, he sat at the dining table with his mother and made red poppies for Memorial Day. Like her husband, Alta ("Anne") served stateside during the Second World War. She gathered little red cloth petals, wound them onto a wire to be worn in honor of our veterans. My husband …

5 EAGLES

We had never before seen five bald eagles at once on our beach. Clutch size of eagles has been rising ever since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring alerted the general public about the dangers of DDT. (Before we began poisoning crops, bald eagles in Chesapeake Bay had clutches of four or, rarely, five eggs. The average size …

How have we come to “trade the fiddle for the drum”?

Fiddle and the Drum And so once again, My dear Johnny, my dear friend, And so once again you are fighting us all, And when I ask you why, You raise your sticks and cry, and I fall, Oh, my friend, How did you come, To trade the fiddle for the drum. You say I …

I don’t quite HATE FedEx

Just saying. The company has, on occasion, delivered a package to us. Sometimes there has been a guy who knew his way around. More often whoever is delivering it tries a neighbor, leaves it unprotected in the rain, or otherwise screws up. I have cancelled orders online if the only delivery option was FedEx. Some …

CRASH

My computer screen went all magenta last Friday and is being (hopefully) repaired. Maybe by the weekend—they said maybe earlier, but I think it may have died at a mere six months and two days, an infant laptop still under warranty. It has been flakey since I first opened it, and one son shrugs and …

MUDDLED MAY

Yesterday we spotted a shrew and I followed it about for a couple of minutes, trying to capture photos of its tiny face. This was a small critter, just over an inch across, and it poked its head into the grass repeatedly, upending itself into little depressions and then moving on, apparently looking for shelter. …

IMPRINT EACH DAY

We walk nearly every morning and some days, when the wind drives onshore, we fill our bags with trash. Other days, like this morning, there was hardly a thing cast ashore. Most trash comes from the ocean. All of Gary's Mother's Day wish is gone this morning. I thought the sand dollars had been swept …

Mother’s Day

The courage that my mother had Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892 - 1950 The courage that my mother had Went with her, and is with her still: Rock from New England quarried; Now granite in a granite hill. The golden brooch my mother wore She left behind for me to wear; I have no thing …