Category: Essays

How strange the air. How strange this place. Austere facades of tall stucco buildings meet the sidewalk at sharp right angles. Tall narrow windows occlude light...

Then you inject seductive love into the heart of every creature that lives in the seas and mountains and river torrents and bird-haunted thickets, implanting in...

A couple of times a week, I walk in the neighborhood just south of East Campus, the agricultural campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Before I began wo...

We charm the waitress in her colorful sombrero at Paradiso Mexican Restaurant when our party of seven arrives.  Three tables pushed together against a long...

Before I sat one-on-one with someone who would later murder people in their classrooms, I had long been cognizant of my mortality. It began in childhood, with t...

Having wandered away from my parents during a family outing, I have just climbed a long flight of steps up an artificial mountain with an enormous golden dome a...

When I first get a glimpse of her—ragged jeans, ponytail, dirty apron—behind the concession stand at a local arts benefit, someone brushes my elbow: my good rea...

What is it about sea turtles? When I tell someone—anyone—that I swam with sea turtles, their eyes smile, shoulders drop, cheek muscles soften. Ohhh, I love sea ...

  My mother Audrey was a birdwatcher. In the 1960’s, when she began pursuing this curious habit, four percent of the U.S. population admitted to bird watch...

  The humid heat of San Miguel Ixtahuacán leaves me sweat-soaked and out of breath from the steep climb to the house at the top of the hill. A woman opens ...