Woke to the sound of German choral music and then spent an hour cooking a roux. Drove to the park but had to keep stopping to take pictures of the sky. Pink in every direction, peaks white with snow. Ran… Read More ›
pacific northwest
Make-ahead memories
There is also something intensely masculine about cooking large cuts of meat, or the entirety of an animal, like a turkey. I do it because no one else in my family will. It falls in the same category of dad… Read More ›
The cat-faced canker
There is nothing like a chainsaw to make a man feel like a man. I caught myself in a dramatic pose sinking that steel into the side of a fallen tree, slinging it like a weapon, wondering how ominous and… Read More ›
Change my life
It’s the strongest wind storm of the year and I do something I’ve never done before: drag a chair outside and sit by the front door with a blanket and coffee watching it come in. The sound is like the… Read More ›
Don’t fall on me
If there’s any month in Seattle I really struggle with the rain it’s November. It’s not a mist or a drizzle but full-on sheets of rain, sideways rain, cold, blowing rain. Rain that gets through old roofs and runs down… Read More ›
After blackberry picking
I remember the day Lily and I came home from our road trip. We’d left Utah on a Sunday morning and reached Seattle by lunchtime on Tuesday. Hadn’t driven more than six hours a day, surprised by how quickly it… Read More ›
Bookending
You could see where the landscape fabric was poking through the bark I put down in the beds and that rankled me. I hated seeing the irregularities, the underlying scheme. I could get really anal retentive like that. We noticed… Read More ›
Sand tray therapy
It is here I feel most at home. Oil City. The worst name for the best place. No oil, no city: a developer’s name, a get-rich scheme. There is no imagination in the name only nature here, no boundaries or… Read More ›
100% remote
Softly the leaves on the burning bush began to turn. In my mind I pictured it going red then dropping like confetti, like broken glass. No car alarms or sirens in the suburbs, just the sound of our lawn sprinkler… Read More ›
Outposts
When it’s almost dark you can hear the wind picking up across the desert. Maybe a flagpole clanking, some far-off dogs, the day’s last birds. We are in a new development surrounded by farmlands and distant mountains. The ground is… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 