Blossom Beatty Pidduck

    The Long View

    A few days ago my 10-year-old daughter confessed to me that she hasn’t been doing very well in her language arts assignments at school. My eyebrows immediately went up (according to my kids this is my instant “tell” of displeasure). …
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    Happy Campers

    Standing in the grocery store line a couple of days before Thanksgiving, four items beyond Express Lane maximum, I tore my gaze away from the magazine racks (recent challenges for Britney, the Queen’s real feelings about Kate, how Jen stays …
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    In Stark Relief

    If you think of the land as a palimpsest—a piece of fabric or hide, sturdy pergamena or velum, here wrinkled, here smooth—on which human and natural history is written and rewritten, then what are fires? Are they a kind of malevolent …
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    Time and Looking

    We’d come indoors, Beto (José Cortez, Thacher Facilities) and I, from picking up the smaller downed limbs in the yard and raking some of the other detritus ripped from trees around the house in the demon-winds of that first night. …
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    There, then gone.

    Ephemera, 6:47-6:56am Friday 11.10.17 •three horses, stock still and staring at me, in Diamond Hitch turnout •a dozen quail beating it out of the bushes, “Prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt!” •bright white mares’-tails in a swivet above the Los Padres foothills •dew-diamonds hanging fire on the …
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    Colls

    It often begins well before sunrise, that dark time when I’m tempted to grab my headlamp but, in waning moonlight, end up trusting my feet to know the way to our meeting place: up walkway, over speed bump and curb, …
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    Kids to Spare

    I didn’t see it coming, the “F” I got at mid-term in my Toad Blog “class”–the one I designed and am taking as the only student this year. Oh, I’ve failed before, but this was a surprise because I was …
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