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At my sister’s wedding in September, I had a conversation with her grandmother-in-law about squirrels. She’s from Texas. She was baffled at the boldness and number of squirrels in my parents’ backyard, chirping from the fences, playing with the bluejays and sparrows at the neighbors’ birdfeeders. Later in the season, they devoured the pumpkins my…
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A few years ago, I made the resolution that I would never wear anything I could not crash on someone’s floor in. Since then, my wardrobe has morphed into a collection of knits, worn denim, and layerable second hand pieces that I can and have taken naps in. However, I have two favorite pieces. Two…
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My heart lives in the shadow of the Rockies, where I was born, where I spent my childhood catching crayfish in freezing streams and scrambling over boulders that overlooked the great flat plains to the east. There is no place I am more at home than beneath the canopies of lodgepole and ponderosa forests, picking…
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Short answer: yes. Long answer: Instinct is just pattern recognition, taking slivers of information presented to you by a third party and running them through the immense meaty computer of your brain until it prints out something that says “I’ve seen this before”. Before we settled into tidy little farms, we used it to pick…
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I love accidents. I don’t mean that in the morbid “I love the horror of a bunch of people dying,” I assure you. Instead, I love examining the many clockwork fragments of these events, like the terrible PR approach that blew Threemile Island into a public relations nightmare or the numerous regulatory failures that allowed…
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In 2013, the city of Melbourne assigned ID numbers to trees and gave them an email address, allowing the public to report downed branches or disease. Instead, people wrote love letters to their favorite trees. Everyone can write a love letter to a tree in their past. I can. Dear maple tree in my backyard,…
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Hidden among the rolling fields of corn and soy in Antelope county, Nebraska sit the Ashfall Fossil Beds. This unique death assemblage tells the story of a massive volcanic event that covered the American midwest in ash some 10 million years ago. The animals interred here represent the fauna that flocked to a savannah watering…
from the pen of icarus blake 