Time. Oh. A slippery one, that. Bendy and elusive. Full of tricks, even. Have you ever tripped on a tree root or rock that’s hiding...

I missed a happy-birthday wish, a few days ago. One of those “big ones,” too. His 450th. An artist named Michelangelo Merisi da...

Once a tree dies, it seems much easier to know. Sure, I love looking up at a tall, breathing tree. I love looking up at a whole woods of...

“Sola now muborak [sic],” I remembered, from a napkin-scrawled note on a workday in Arlington, Virginia, mid-1980s. Dr. Latifi was...

Ralph Waldo Emerson called them “incidental friends.” Our community of acquaintances – neighbors you don’t know all that well, but wave...

Last week, after visiting friends and family in California -- few days in Bay Area, few days in San Diego, with glorious, low-humidity...

Even as a 2nd-grader, I understood that 1) without a dead body, there would be no ritual of shared grief. No funeral, at a church or...

Clarence, my longtime 6-stringed companion, has aided and abetted some of my strangest inexplicable moments. I’m not sure if holding his...

‘If the guy sitting next to me takes out a pipe and a pouch of tobacco – especially cherry-flavored – I will crawl under this table and...

Have you ever seen a ‘lenticular’ picture, where multiple images integrate into one surface, so the subject seems to move, when you look...

Sometimes, moments from incongruent eras of your life arise and collide, and make you snort a beverage right out of your nose. This...

We’re having a yard sale! Early June. I asked my nearest (human) neighbors about it and they’re up for a multi-family, corner...

UPDATE, late June 2021, as promised: It's almost quiet again, humming-in-the-trees-wise, 17-year-cycle-wise. The carcasses of emerged...

8 or 9 years ago, I stopped at a Safeway on a Sunday afternoon in May. A few yards inside the sliding-door entrance, a young female...

As off-balance as I felt in March 2020 by not leaving the house and working from my kitchen, I’m anxious in new ways about returning to...

Pondering how an absence of certain challenges, in our own lives, makes it tough even to perceive that some people do have those...

Part 2 after https://www.marymuffindonovan.com/post/of-flying-sandwiches-and-sensory-life-part-1-4-21-21 Dreaming that my teeth started...

Music, an easy one; the first few measures of the Overture from “Carousel,” one of thousands, for me. Food grilling, on the breeze from...

Last night, both April Fool’s and Holy Thursday of the Last Supper in the religion of my youth, several ambulances screamed past my car. ...

In the mid-‘80s, my guitar, Clarence, and I opened for a comedian in Charlottesville, VA. My law-school roommates and I had seen him on...