April 3, 2026

‘Tis the season for worms to travel from one side of the driveway to the other. For most of my life, I thought that water trapped them. Recently, I learned that water helps them relocate – a reverse-parting of the Red Sea.

I learned that some worms can survive two weeks submerged in water. It may seem, if we’re too late to relocate the stranded after the storm, that so many don’t make the journey. The other side of that, though, is what we can’t see: the many, many more who do make it to safety.

March 20, 2026

Eid Mubarak – eidkum mubarak! On an evening often celebrated with family and close friends, I smell for the first time in months the birth-death-rest scent that’s been waiting under the snow. Bluebirds jostle for an east-facing hole left behind by woodpeckers, the shedding of a tree limb. The pile of last year’s second-hand stones I never laid are home, now, to insects and salamanders.

There is a sacred belonging that this cusp of spring engenders. How comforting that my unfinished plans may be the starting point of someone else’s story.

February 20, 2026

It’s my first time tapping maple trees, and I assumed that the trees by the woods would produce more sap – something about them being more “in nature” than the pair by the road.

As it turns out, the trees by the road seem to be saying, “I’m so glad you asked.” A-mile-a-minute sap runs over flattened lichens. The milk jugs overfloweth. Smarter people tell me: that’s because the crowns of these road-trees are bigger. Their south-facing flanks are warmed by the sun long before the woods-trees thaw.

February 12, 2026