Today is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. I don’t remember what I was doing on April 22nd in 1970. I was seven years old living in a split-level home in the western suburbs of Chicago. We had a dog named Missy and were a few years away from adding Patches the rabbit to our…

The morning started overcast when I opened the drapes to greet Kalalea, the mountain across the street. I’ve been thinking about a question my friend Lynette asked on her blog the other day. “Tell us how self-isolation has affected you,” she wrote. It’s a question I get asked over and over—from friends, from my Dad,…

Busy day today, so I’ll just share a few of the shows (and a movie) that are (and are not) getting us through the COVID-19 sheltering-in-place.* Last Tango in Halifax: A sweet story but with some grit. It doesn’t get high marks by way of stars, but I like it. Self Made: The story of…

This coronavirus has me thinking about the impact of small things. Unlike an invasive seed stuck on the bottom your shoe that you can remove with a scrub brush, you cannot tell whether an infectious COVID-19 particulate has landed on your finger.  Like the fungus that’s killing ‘ōhi‘a trees, some microscopic organisms are destructive.  The…

In The Wild Marsh, Rick Bass quotes Paul Gruchow in his epigraph: “To inhabit a place means literally to have made it a habit, to have learned how to wear a place like a familiar garment, like garments of sanctity  that nuns once wore. The word  habit, in its now-dim original form, means “to own.” We own…

Costco still doesn’t have toilet paper. But, at least, there wasn’t a line to get in the store, as there was two-and-a-half weeks ago when I went. But let’s talk about masks. Everyone is wearing them. It’s a mandate by the mayor and encouraged by our governor when in public, and everyone is complying. Homemade…