This year, with five yearling apples trees and five apple trees we revived from near death when we bought this place three years ago, the biggest challenge to our trees is ants and the aphids those ants raise on the clover, so to speak, of the tender apple leaves just now emerging along with the onset of blossoms.
Posts published in “Essays”
The thing I look most forward to reading each week when I receive my Advertiser — well, most weeks — okay, on the semi-rare occasions when the paper shows up — fine! Both times that…
Jim and friends were the local stalwarts of Iraq War protests, demonstrating every Friday from 5-6 pm in front of the courthouse on State Street in Ukiah. He was there the longest, from Fall of…
Michael Turner, aka "Dr. Sapatoo," is a renowned reggae music journalist and mobile disc jockey, as well as a practicing physician. He has lived in Mendocino County for 15 years, but travels the world in…
The dogwood tree outside my bedroom window is exploding with white flowers, in contrast to the redbud in the backyard. The forest edges are painted white, purple, and green, as mustards bloom in all the…
Until a short time ago I, like many, had never heard of Sites or even what or where Sites was. A little research indicates that Sites is in Colusa County, California and was established in…
Last year, handguns killed forty-eight people in Japan, eight in Great Britain, fifty-two in Canada, twenty-one in Sweden, and 10,728 in the United States. I was listening to the Giants sweep the Dodgers and feeling euphoric and glad when I received the email with those handgun death statistics, and I was reminded of a dharma talk I attended many years ago in Berkeley.
Back in the days right after the extinction of the dinosaurs, when I was still new to New York City, it was a pretty frequent thing to spot Robert Christgau riding his crappy-looking bike around…
Candy Bergen has just published a memoir called "A Fine Romance." According to the New York Times, the actress "parses the nation’s infatuation with the CBS sitcom 'Murphy Brown,' in which she starred for a…