Your mother and I are very proud.

An old photo: The University under construction and light snow. The place has no shortage of crossing guards, blocked off buildings, rerouted walkways and so forth. Plants are going in, grass is going down, paths are going concrete and a new library, here, is descending into the ground. Maintenance requires novelty.

I really am partial to plants, of course: boojum trees, waxy sea grapes and spiky epiphytes, cacti, sword ferns, pinchable succulents, and so on. Little hidden orange blossoms. Papery old leaves incorporated into the trunk of a squat frondy thing as it grows. It’s great stuff. The walls of the greenhouse were the things worth [...]

“Prohibitively cold” seems to mean under zero degrees Fahrenheit here. So, having left even the rough-and-tumble bicycle in the basement to gather millipedes, I bussed it. The cold definitely prohibited this crow– puffed, if you can’t tell, to about twice normal size– from doing anything beyond blinking at me while I took a photo. It’s [...]

Spend your youth pleasantly ruining various outfits and hairdos on the warm cracked pavement of a very small town, and you will come away with quite a fondness for grasshoppers. This guy was having trouble marshalling all of his limbs, and was, despite his obvious propriety on that flower, not a champ at holding on [...]

The cupboard above the stove. Both jars.

About halfway between my home and school, I take a turn around this fountain, which doesn’t so much jet water as hurl great big globs of it around.

On a smallish and trending toward less obscure island off the Gulf coast, a hotel takes care of business.