Posts under ‘Overheard’

I’ve been back from Burning Man for a week, and I’m already planning next year’s trip. I may be a girl who loves her oceans, but when you take a dried lakebed and fill it with community and creativity and ridiculous art and cars that look like yachts and butterflies and music that goes 24 [...]

Earlier this week, Michelle Obama launched “Let’s Move,” the new national childhood obesity prevention campaign. Though I rarely talk about work here, it was an exciting day for my organization, which has been working on this issue as part of a larger initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. As with all Washington, DC [...]

Before April slips away, I wanted to just honor National Poetry Month, and wanted to give a shout-out to my friend Susan Borie Chambers, who I met at the same writing residency in Vermont where I met my friend Gary Miller. The poem I’ve linked to from her name is one that she read to [...]

Although I have professed my love for the flowering trees of D.C. (and, oh yes, that does include the cherry blossoms), I’ve got to admit – I never spent much time when I lived there thinking about their symbolism. I mean, the cherry trees? To me, they symbolized the hurray of Spring, and they symbolized [...]

“You got ID, sir?” the NYPD officer said. The man in the brown tweed suit continued peeling a potato, oblivious to the scowling officer standing over him. “Sir,” the officer repeated. “You got ID? You gotta have ID to sell here.” The man continued talking in an English accent about the benefits of the peeler [...]

“Do you own a cat?” asked my next-door neighbor earlier tonight. He was exiting his house while I was tending to the watering I didn’t get to before work this morning. “No,” I said. “There’s one standing by the car,” he said. “I wondered if it was yours.” I shook my head. “Do you want [...]

I just returned from a longer-than-a-week business trip (well, business trip capped off by a birthday weekend with my parents), and even though I was away from the garden for longer than I might have liked, the garden, clearly, was not far from me. 1. National security threat As I was going through security on [...]

Last year, I did not grow nearly enough parsley. What parsley we did grow came up sparsely (Parsley, sparsely. It feels like an Ogden Nash poem…), and it never felt as abundant as, well, grabbing a bunch at the store. You know those store bunches: fat and happy and usually more of the flat-leaf variety [...]

There are a few ways to acquire compost. You can buy it, you can borrow it (it’s the giving it back that’s hard) or you can make it. Although Steve and I finally decided it was time to make the leap to making it via a compost pile, that wasn’t going to do us any [...]

As Steve walked by me the other night, I said, “Do you know what we’re going to have to do soon?” “What?” “We’re going to have to go to Paul’s Discount and get a bunch of dirt,” I said. There was resounding silence as Steve fled into another room. “Aren’t you excited?” I yelled after [...]