Your mother and I are very proud.

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 [...]