Did you miss us?  My last day of school was yesterday; Peter’s was two days before that.  Every year, it’s the same thing: achingly hard work to begin and end the school year, and achingly hard work to end it.  And every year, I forget just how hard it’s going to be. Maybe that’s for the best.  I don’t know. In any case, tired or not, we did our weekly weigh-in and photograph on Sunday, as usual.  This week was... Read more

Officially, summer begins on the summer solstice, June 21. In actuality, as any school-child or teacher can tell you, summer begins on the day that his or her own school lets out for summer vacation.  This year, summer begins on June 23, at least for me.  However, it’s doing a very nice warm-up act already. Last night, I was dumbfounded by the fireflies in my yard. I grew up with fireflies–and crickets, and song-birds, and trees.  I remember that when... Read more

So I was expecting a horrible result for the plastic weigh-in this week, partly because my husband Peter has joined me in the no-plastics challenge, and he bought bookshelves this week… that had been padded, in their boxes, with styrofoam. It is amazing how much volume plastic has for its mass, though.  Our combined total for the week was still 6 oz. And, to make the definitions clearer:Last week, I was not counting Peter as a full partner in this... Read more

It’s one of my favorite memories. On the last day of the small Pagan gathering, perhaps a dozen of us had hiked down the hill, piled into our cars, and made our way to the neighborhood pancake house.  Sweaty and grimy, smelling of woodsmoke and insect repellent, clad in hiking boots and sneakers, shorts and blue jeans, we had taken one long table in the middle of the restaurant. The restaurant itself is a celebration of all things down-to-earth and... Read more

This week, I thinned out the volunteer saplings that had sprouted up amid the groundcover around the stump of an old white pine. We would never have taken down that pine tree ourselves, but by the time we bought the house, the damage had been done. The downside to that has been a loss of a wonderful visual screen between the lawn and our busy street. The upside is planting a mini-orchard of semi-dwarf apples along the front of the... Read more

OK, so it is actually a little less than a full week; I began collecting my plastic on June 1st. However, I want to have a regular weigh-in day, and Sunday will probably work out best, so here we are. The grand total for Week 1: 6 oz. of plastic. I was really quite discouraged at the amount of plastic I’d accumulated in the (plastic! But not new plastic) bin for this week, until I weighed it out. Actually, I... Read more

Day Two of the No Plastics Project, and so far I’m noticing how much I have not been noticing. First of all, to be clear, I am not, unlike Beth Terry of Fake Plastic Fish, even trying to get rid of the plastic that I have in my house, serving in long-term jobs. Though I suspect that plastic does pose health threats to humans, I’m almost fifty years old. I’ve been surrounded by the stuff most of my life, my... Read more

For quite a while now, I’ve had a growing concern about plastic and its impact on the environment. Pagans, of course, theoretically worship the earth, the land, and the cycles of nature. And not only do many Quaker meetings maintain an environmental witness, but Quakers have long been enjoined to “examine our possessions for the seeds of war.” What if we examined, all of us, our possessions for the seeds of a different kind of war, the war our species... Read more

For quite a while now, I’ve had a growing concern about plastic and its impact on the environment. Pagans, of course, theoretically worship the earth, the land, and the cycles of nature. And not only do many Quaker meetings maintain an environmental witness, but Quakers have long been enjoined to “examine our possessions for the seeds of war.” What if we examined, all of us, our possessions for the seeds of a different kind of war, the war our species... Read more

A good and modest man is dead, and I am sad. Last night, my friend Alexei Kondratiev died. He was only sixty-one. I found out online, at The Wild Hunt, the Pagan news blog, and my mind has been throwing these momentary blanks in the hours since I read the news; I’ll be puttering along, minding my business, when I’ll find myself wondering, Why do I feel so heavy, so sad? And then I remember: Alexei died last night. We... Read more