still other winters average their rain months into a long, cold season of relentless sog and little color. At such times, looking out through the spattered glass, I feel, deep in some spongy, unignorable organ,...

We look up, if only to see if we’re likely to be rained on. The sky calls attention to itself, whether scored by herons, cranes, or wires; illumined by sunsets, Perseids, or ballparks; broken up...

Along with rising and falling water, winter is the province of wind. When the sea-breath and mountain-roar bend the hemlocks of these hills, the birds hang on as best they can.

I thought of a sign I had seen… another scary time, when I was two hundred feet up in a giant karri tree in South West Australia. At the point where the precarious spiral ladder...

It is the gift of stories that most repays life among settled people.

That kind of walk is nice when it happens, but I’ll take four minutes now and then over being butt-stapled to a chair all day long.

when that small Siberian bird fell out of the sky over Gray’s River, not once but twice, he brought with him the sweetness of chance in any place, the certainty of wonder in all places....