Have you ever built a wire fence by hand? I’m not going to tell you how to do it, because I’m sure I didn’t do it right. But I found what I did do deeply satisfying, like sewing on a grand scale. I dug holes and sunk my big long branches deep in the mud, and wove the chicken wire over the branches as if the branches were giant needles and the wire was cloth being basted. The fence... Read more
I apologize ahead of time for the length of this post; as you’ll see, a good half of it is just quotes from a transcript of a sickening video that was posted publicly to YouTube and Twitter then quickly made private this evening. The video, entitled “My Biracial Boy,” is a fifteen-minute diatribe by none other than Abby Johnson, the darling of the pro-life movement, a former abortion clinic worker whose conversion story has been questioned by investigative reporters. Johnson... Read more
I want to say a few more words about all the destruction and removal of municipal statues that we’re seeing in the news lately– especially since talk has now turned to religious art. First of all, art is important. Art is very, very important. Art is language. The fine arts are how we humans communicate, understand, heal, accuse, confess. Art is informed by culture but it also informs and moves cultures. It’s hard to place too much importance on... Read more
Today I replaced my ruined plants. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t able to resurrect my broccoli. It might have worked on a cool day in early spring, with plants that had only been drying out in the heat a few minutes. But yesterday was a sweltering day. The broccoli died from my neighbor’s vandalizing rampage– two broccoli plants escaped her hands, but the six plants she uprooted and threw into the yard died. She also murdered one strawberry, and the backyard... Read more
This week has been hard. On Thursday night, Rosie forgot to lock up her bike, and we found it missing the next morning. This is the second time this bike has been stolen— the man who took it actually wheeled it back to my yard a few weeks later, last year when it went missing. He expected we’d reward him for giving it back, but we turned him away with a stern warning. And this year, here it was... Read more
There is something about gardening that’s almost guaranteed to make you superstitious. I was in the garden at twilight because I’m sensitive to heat and it was nice and cool after the evening rain. I was planting late corn in circles closer together than the package says to, do because that’s an actual gardening technique for pollination. But I was also just in the garden at twilight, drawing circles in the ground and burying things. A stray cat came by,... Read more
Last night, a female Patheos Catholic colleague got sexually harassed. You can read about the situation here. I don’t believe that Dave Armstrong meant to sexually harass her. He did sexually harass her: that’s what it is when a man asks a co-worker about her sex life, and particularly when an old man asks his very young female colleague, who has spoken openly about being a victim of sexual abuse before, questions about her sex life. Marie volunteered that she... Read more
The civil rights demonstrations which began with the protests after George Floyd’s horrific murder at the end of May, are still ongoing. Across the country, many symbols of white supremacism are being destroyed. We’re seeing the removal of several unremarkable municipal statues of Jefferson Davis and his ilk. There are jocular demands to replace the statues with statues of Mothman or Dolly Parton. We’re seeing corporations like Nascar banning the use of the Confederate flag. Some people are upset at... Read more
We’re getting a lot of news now about municipal statues being torn down, because they memorialized Confederate generals or Christopher Columbus. I haven’t been shy about saying I’m in favor. But believe it or not, I do have sympathy for the people who don’t want the statues taken away because they’re “part of our history.” You’re right, of course. Columbus is part of our history. The Civil War is part of our history. I’m unconvinced that unremarkable municipal bronze memorials... Read more
I went out to check on the garden and found a whole army of roly-polys boiling out from under the black landscaper’s cloth. I ran back in to google roly-polys, in case they would hurt my garden. Thankfully, the answer is no. Roly-polys, more properly called pill bugs and most scientifically called “Armadillidiidae,” are harmless and even beneficial in small groups, most of the time. They were just eating the compost I’d recently spread on the garden and taking shelter... Read more
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