I excitedly decided to get a birdbath one day in late April. Filled it with pebbles & fresh water. “I sure hope the birds find it and use it,” I said, picturing dainty songbirds perched all ’round the edges. I was a little worried they wouldn’t come. Right, well. It’s now a few short weeks […]Read Post ›
“It’s awfully quiet in that room, what have you been up to in there?” “NOTHING! Don’t come in here!” Actually, I have been up to something kind of new for me: I’ve been photographing, editing and creating a documentary of sorts. Sometimes you can’t say what you need to say in words, you need sound […]Read Post ›
This weekend’s reading included an essay from a 2010 issue of Poetry Magazine, which has been in a “to read” stack of books I’ve hauled around for a decade, but still hadn’t read. Grad school killed off reading for pleasure; the Coronavirus shutdown revived reading for pleasure; go figure. The essay, Why Live Without Writing […]Read Post ›
Happy Leap Day 2020 to you, and happy 10-year anniversary of being car-free to me! I can’t let this February slip away without celebrating that it marks ten years that I’ve gone without owning a car in America. Yes, I went from a car I’d named Maggie to a bike named Yoko. I don’t even […]Read Post ›
The Unforeseen is a reference to a 2007 documentary I discovered today while trying to come up with title for this blog post, which mainly consists of the sequel to my first email to the city about sidewalk closures. They replied. I had to respond. The word “unforeseen” caught my eye because the length of my […]Read Post ›
That’s a quote from a man working at the site of a future Beaverton hotel/restaurant combo. But more important than a place for people to stay, considering twenty or thirty 50+ mature trees were sawed down to make room for it, is the future driveway and car parking lot the worker told me would be there […]Read Post ›
Why Urban Washington County Will Never Build a Portland-Style Street Grid, and Why That’s a Good Thing When I sat down recently with three City of Hillsboro planners—Don Odermott, Transportation Planning Engineer & Manager; Brad Choi, Transportation Planner; & Ally Holmqvist, Senior Long Range Planner—I was expecting just to discuss adding painted-on bike lanes […]Read Post ›
Not by searching online. I could only find photos of ripe berries, delicious-looking, fat berries. Berries in their prime. Profile-photo quality berries. Blackberry porn. Berries showing their obviously good side, their night-before-the-morning-after side. Berries that make a person think, “Why didn’t I…” I didn’t all summer, at least, not till now, in the last days […]Read Post ›
Naomi Fast 