I was born during the heyday of agricultural use of DDT, and didn’t see my first bald eagle until 1994, twenty-two years after DDT was banned. It was a Sunday in early March, when old snow and bare trees permeated the afternoon with the gray doom of an endless winter, which had weakened but was […]

Climbing to altitude is like walking back in time. I dwell in a valley 1,000 feet above sea level, where spring is greening into summer. Even before the snow left the ground, we pruned the fruit trees and berry bushes. Wearing hats and fleece, we replanted the fence and reseeded the grass where the snowplow […]

My thirty-year old clothes dryer bit the dust last week, leaving me no choice but to hang the laundry out to dry. We bought this appliance when we bought our first house and in anticipation of using cloth diapers. Ew, you say? Consider the alternatives: We lived twenty miles out of town, and storing poopy […]