Every so often in these pages I come staggering out of the woods with twigs in what’s left of my hair and caterpillars angling up my socks and my eyeballs dilated and aiming in different directions with notions of sinister household vehicles or what computer is trying to seize control ...

If you give your eyes a little while to get adjusted to the night sky, there soon starts to be more than just great sprays of lights. Here and there, when conditions are right — meaning when the sky is free of scud that gets in the way and of ...

This is the time of year when winter does not want to let go of its grip, like a mean dog. When the sun is out and the wind is still, it feels like May. But if you speak too soon the wind bites you two months back to the ...

The key to stargazing is points of orientation. In the beginning, like for all beginnings, you take the simple points first, which in the case of stargazing is simply the brightest stars. There are two ways to use the bright stars, and like practically everything else in the universe, the ...

Everything is interacting. People are interacting with their cars and cats and jeejahs, with the woods, with each other. Mosquitoes are interacting with dragonflies. Blue jays with sunflower seeds. Roots with soils. Sunlight with raindrops. Moons with planets, planets with stars, stars with galaxies, and galaxies with more galaxies. The ...

One of the easiest things to understand in chemistry is the model of an atom. An atom is like a mini solar system. It has a nucleus, which is like the sun, and electrons whirling around the nucleus, like planets. After this it gets complicated fast, and since I am ...

The usual summer frameworks were somewhat disjointed this year. Around our house snowbanks lingered into May, the timing of some wildflowers was way off — starflowers weeks late, lupines a month early — and in the end I did see small green rose hips at the end of July, which ...

A few Sunday mornings ago, we went outside to the deck for our coffee and found a familiar sight: The two cats, Brian and Panda, were sleeping under the chairs in the warm, bugless morning air. A little earlier they had eaten their complimentary canned-food breakfast. The bear-cublike orange one, ...

The first bite of fall in Troy this year came Sept. 7, a Wednesday. Just a slight tell-tale chill rolling through the kitchen window, like a nip on the ear. Birch leaves were already strewing the deck, and the sumac had been reddening since August – it always gives in ...