My jeweler is retiring and it’s a crisis! (Originally published on Substack, Jan 29, 2023) My jeweler is retiring and it’s a crisis. My jeweler, who am I kidding, he’s not actually my jeweler but he is our local guy, and he seems to be one of the last people around who will do small repairs. I managed to get him to resize several rings, including a couple that were very old that the bigger jewelry stores over in Bozeman wouldn’t touch, and to clean up and fix a St. Christopher medal that my mother managed to bend out of shape. There’s…
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Sinking into the restorative dark. I have always thought of this week between Christmas and New Years as a sort of Holy Week. Once Christmas is over, and everyone relaxes, you can sink down into the protective darkness, creep off into a corner by the wood stove with a new book and a new notebook and dream your way into the new year. I protect this week. I rarely make plans. I want to stay home, make soup, take down the Christmas tree, and see what’s stuck in my mind after a busy year. I long ago gave up going…
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I’ve sunsetted LivingSmall and have begun a new project called Getting Dirty — Material Enganglements in the Anthropocene. The Getting Dirty project is an experiment in teasing apart the the entanglements our thinky human brains make with materiality, and how our reactions to that entanglement lead us into all sorts of trouble. Entanglement is the place where we rub up against one another — sometimes these are sympathetic encounters, and sometimes they’re more like broken pieces of china rubbing together, making that scratch that hurts you in your teeth. I hope you’ll come along for the ride as we think…
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I went back to Chicago at the beginning of the month for the funeral of my dear friend Posy and on my way to the beach for a swim, I discovered that the Henricks house, which they sold a couple of years back, had been torn down! These poor worker guys were a little bewildered when I came flying into the driveway in my rental car, and leaped out, aghast. This is what the house looked like before: One part of growing up with a lot of social capital and zero money is that you largely grow up in the…
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I have taken to floating in the Yellowstone. I have finally found a good spot. It’s along the path where I walk Hank, an eddy deep enough to dive in, and wide enough to swim around a little bit. Because it’s an eddy, you don’t get swept downstream, and because I am no longer young and lean, I can finally, float. I was a sinker all the way through my childhood. I was a sinker during the years I led rafting and canoe trips. At summer camp, they lined up on the pier to watch me fail the backfloat. The…
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I realized earlier this week that if it’s August 2022, then it’s 20 years since I managed to fool the bank into lending me money to buy this house. I never thought I’d have a house. Houses were what my parents lost. Once the baby got sick and they split up, once Dad went bankrupt the first time, then it was a steady slide down the economic ladder. First to go was the fifteen acre horse farm, then the house in Lake Forest, then the condo in Madison, then even after we moved in with Dad it was one house,…
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You might have heard, we had a flood. We’re fine. Our houses weren’t even close to being touched by floodwaters, but I am once again grateful for Geology 101, the course for non-majors at Beloit College, where Prof. Stenstrom drilled into our heads that we should be geologically aware when buying a house. My front yard is 4 feet above the sidewalk, with a concrete retaining wall, and the alley drops off steeply about 2 houses down hill from me. Even if the levee hadn’t held, I’d probably have been fine. However, others were not so lucky. Our neighbors on…
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This stretch of ditch I’ve been walking the past few years is empty now. The headgate was turned off in late summer, and the water went down slowly, but surely, until now it’s dry stone and snow. But there’s water in the distribution box. I normally stop there at the end of our dog walk, say the Heart Sutra, and look down the ditch to the Absaroka-Beartooth range rising in front of us. Some days I have to try to muster up some hope, other days, it’s all so beautiful I can’t believe I live here. Form is emptiness, emptiness…
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I know, it’s been a minute. In part it’s because I got headhunted for a new job — I’m back in the corporate fold, with nice people and a real salary and actual benefits again. But it’s also Been A Lot. Learning new things, meeting new people, getting my feet underneath me. So here we are. There was a lull. The other thing that happened is that we went on a small exploratory trip to the West Coast. It was so hot and dry all summer that I was jonesing for the ocean. Which is amusing since I am terrified…
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The weather finally broke. Yesterday was all clouds and soft showers. Today is the same. We had a couple of small frosts in September, but for the most part, it was more fire weather. Hot dry days and wind. So dry that watering doesn’t really work anymore. The last few weeks, I’ve just been survival watering. Trying to keep new plants alive, trying to keep trees from dying. You can feel the water evaporating as it comes out of the hose, puddling up on ground that’s gone hard as clay. According to the local paper, we’ve had 8.36 inches of…