“Only in Minnesota,” the guy shouts into the blizzard as he shovels behind our rear tires, “can you have eighteen inches of snow one day, then a week of ninety-degree days, followed by this shit!” His mountain-man…
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A friend shows me a beautiful potted mum. Its rich orange-red buds have burst open with vibrant sprays of sun-yellow at their center. The plant—of a variety called “Autumn Sunset”—is simply gorgeous. “The garden center…
This morning I delivered Jihong to the Sioux Falls airport, an hour south of us, for the first leg of an overseas business trip.
As he’d prepared to leave home, a strange sequence of problems bedeviled our household appliances:
My laptop died.
Our coffeemaker died.
Our hot water heater died.
Our gas fireplace died.
One wintry day, long ago, I had the privilege of visiting with a woman I’ll call Rose. Ninety-five years old, she was recovering from a broken hip at the home of her daughter, a good…
Note: In our last edition of Staying Power, I told a story about how stars had come to be in the night sky. In response, a reader asked me how the daytime sky had come…
I’ve been out of studio this week. No worries, I’m fully recovered from last week’s kidney stone attack (thanks for your well wishes). But with Jihong’s university on spring break, we’ve headed for the hills—the Black Hills, that is, on the western side of South Dakota.
The Black Hills are in the middle of a March thaw. They still have enough snow for Jihong to ski, but the season will likely end next week.
I The woman wades into the shallow stream. The frigid October water nips the skin of her legs. The gravelly bottom bites the soles of her bare feet. It’s too late in the season for…
After a long, strenuous hike, you happen upon a river. A crude raft is beached on the sandy shore. Tacked to it is a paper that reads: “Take me downstream.” The handwriting strangely resembles your own.
You don’t know who made the raft, or why they’ve left it here. You don’t know how well it’s constructed. Does it even float?
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…
I’m recently arrived home from a sojourn with my family in the Smoky Mountains, which are so old and awash in trees, they look like an undulating sea of waves. These images were taken on…
I’m now wearily, happily, home from Costa Rica. My silence during the final few days of my trip was due largely to exhaustion from so many beautiful hikes in the cloud forests around Monteverde and…
Tomorrow I leave the coast of Costa Rica and its gorgeous sunsets for the cloud forests of Monteverde. I invite you to enjoy some of my sunset photography. Just for fun, which of these four…
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