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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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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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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It feels wrong to be trying to shape my thoughts about the Thomas Fire and The Thacher School, the Ojai Valley, the still vulnerable coastal communities, and my little life when the fire continues to rage and rout, advancing mostly …
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Yesterday morning, twenty-four hours before students and teachers would return from Thanksgiving break, I was cutting across the sunshiny Pergola to fetch from Olympus any mail that might have arrived in the past few days. There, near the toadstool tables …
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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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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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It’s possible that someone within the sound of my virtual voice recalls the kitchen scene in The Big Chill—although as one of my advisees informed me the other night, “My parents were hardly even born when that movie came out!” …
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I know it’s balsam in the Rocky Mountain air we’re hiking through this morning (as a kid, I built forts in stands of pine and fir), but darned if I can figure out if that’s a chipping sparrow or a …
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The following is a talk recently delivered by Head of School Michael K. Mulligan at one of our regular All-School Assemblies. Like many others around our nation, I have not been able to watch the national news lately without wincing. …
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