This cute critter got me thinking about nesting. She’s a thirteen-lined ground squirrel. Her burrow lay beneath the campsite that my family occupied for several days this past week. The main entrance to the burrow…
Phyllis Cole-DaiAugust 17, 2021
I admit that I counted my proverbial chickens. Once the distribution of the COVID vaccine was well underway in the U.S., I thought the pandemic would soon be over here. Bursting with optimism, I changed…
Phyllis Cole-DaiAugust 11, 2021
Sometimes in life you just don’t know what you’re getting into. You’re reminded of this, the day you kayak through an otherworldly stretch of sea caves in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. The Lakeshore is…
Phyllis Cole-DaiAugust 3, 2021
My family has just returned from a long camping vacation around Lake Superior. Our first time there. My goodness, "lake" is too small a word for the great inland sea that the Ojibwe nation calls…
Phyllis Cole-DaiJuly 22, 2021
The house where I live is around 130 years old. It has loads of character from bygone days. In size, it started small, then grew like a family over time. Its exterior is covered with…
Phyllis Cole-DaiJuly 14, 2021
Back in elementary school, we had periodic desk inspections. Whenever the teacher would lift the wooden lid of my desk, the contents of the book bin looked shipshape—on the surface. That’s because I’d perfectly arranged…
Phyllis Cole-DaiJune 28, 2021
This weekend in the U.S., we’re observing Father’s Day. We’re also celebrating Juneteenth, a festival that commemorates the end of American slavery. Juneteenth was just signed into law as a new federal holiday on Thursday.…
Phyllis Cole-DaiJune 21, 2021
It has recently been brought to my attention that I’m a door slammer. A slammer of car doors, especially. Having lived in blissful ignorance of this fact until now, I shudder to think of the…
Phyllis Cole-DaiJune 18, 2021
Perhaps you’ve noticed: Sometimes, despite meticulous preparations, life just doesn’t go as we planned. Like when you decide to fly halfway across the continent, retrieve your eighty-one-year-old mother, and bring her back home for an…
Phyllis Cole-DaiJune 4, 2021
Tomorrow I fly to North Carolina to retrieve my eighty-one-year-old mother and bring her here to South Dakota for as long as she wants to stay. I can’t wait to throw my arms around her…
Phyllis Cole-DaiMay 17, 2021
May I make a confession? While I love my mother, and I love being a mother myself, I don’t particularly love observing Mother’s Day. To me, the second Sunday of May feels like another “Hallmark…
Phyllis Cole-DaiMay 11, 2021
See if you can figure out the significance of my title before I finish. * * * The last few weeks, I’ve been living in the closet, producing the audiobook version of Staying Power: Writings…
Phyllis Cole-DaiMay 7, 2021
