The Shadows of Doubt
“We all have our ghosts,” a friend of mine is fond of saying. Perhaps he is more haunted than the rest of us, for he believes that ghosts are behind all human passion, animating...
Category: The Word from Pandora’s Tavern
Emotional Comfort
Late afternoon, Day of the Dead. An election looms. We’re out of dog food so I drive down the mountain to resupply. The radio waves are jammed with polls and pols. It’s getting darker...
Weeding the Woods
Paradise Hill. Late spring. Everywhere the garlic mustard “invasive.” I wander eye-entangled woods. Bend pluck toss. Every step is a step, lively. No way to eradicate this stuff—greed hate delusion—best hope “get it to...
Elevator Music
Yesterday we made an excursion to a museum in Saratoga Springs. They told us at the door, “We have no art today.” But isn’t this a museum? “Yes, but the exhibitions are being swapped...
Toxic Waste Day
It’s Toxic Waste Day. A blessing! The one day in the year when the residents of our county are invited to dispose of their accumulated “household hazardous materials”–for free! No questions asked. That’s good,...
Create Meadows and Get Rid of Unruly Brush
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place ...
Unwritten in Stone
Mr. Tombeaux, an amateur geologist, directs our attention to this roadside Hadean outcrop. Few geological traces of the Hadean Eon remain on Earth. So we look to the Moon. The Lunar geologic timescale has...
Inundated in the Catskills
The collies wanted to go ghost hunting. So I took them down to the impoundment called Schoharie Reservoir. There they saw the ghost of a creek, drifting wavering deep in the abyss just past...
Bodega Head: An Excursion in Nuclear Shamanism
They called it the “Glory Hole.” Seventy-three feet deep, one hundred forty-two feet in diameter. It took two expensive years of excavation to open the hole, the work being...
The Big Game
Somebody phoned in an order for pizza but Mr. Tombeaux delivered a sentence instead. It tasted like a heavy chain of words. Oh how it clanked going down, going down.