This year’s winter solstice started auspiciously, behind clouds. A few minutes before dawn, on December 21, a bank of gray on the southeastern horizon was dousing any hopes of my greeting the first rays of sun on its shortest flight of the year. My custom here is to honor this day from its beginning, with…

THE BIRD IS PERCHED atop the spire of a towering Norfolk pine. Normally I wouldn’t raise my binoculars. But there is something odd about this bird, something suggesting a departure from the neighborhood’s cast of usual suspects. The head and body are too big and stout for a dove or a shrike or a mockingbird,…

  Last summer, once it had become abundantly clear that covid was not the harmless little brushfire we had naively hoped, but a global inferno raging to no end, Kathy and I decided to start rescuing dogs again. We would take them in—those collateral victims of the virus who’d been abandoned or surrendered by families…

  FOUR YEARS AGO this month, in the aftermath of the soul-crushing election that had just delivered the meanest and most morally bankrupt of humans to the highest seat of power in the world, I contributed to an anthology seeking words of hope. At the time, I decided my best hope was to counter this…

  For a few days this past October, it seemed like everybody in the world stopped to watch those six minutes in hell, when a 26-year-old trail runner, Kyle Burgess, met a mother cougar in a canyon outside Provo, Utah. Burgess had come upon what he first believed were bobcat kittens gamboling in the trail,…