Living in the woods, we don’t see Mercury very often. It’s always close to the sun, and so it only appears sometimes in morning or evening twilight and never gets high enough in the sky to clear the firs around the house. So in general you have to… Read More
    Strange dark shapes were scuttling around on the sandy bottom. I watched them from the wharf at Chebeague Island with my little 8-year-old hands gripping the splintery planking and my face stuck out over the edge, looking down into the water. They glided around in gangs. Read More
    The news from Mars recently has been as delightfully confusing as ever. It’s not that science is failing to advance – the astronomers are accumulating data hand over fist. But there’s so much knowledge pouring in that it’s hard to understand. How that’s any different… Read More
    By the end of October in these parts, the long decline toward winter has ceased being an autumn flourish and started to look inevitable. The world is literally dying. The fields that turned from May green to midsummer rust and then to hay are now… Read More
    “What’s this?” my wife said. She held up a shiny, speckled red ball about the size of an acorn. Me being the amateur naturalist and science fictionist in the house, and everybody else being merely curious, she expected I’d have an answer, or at least… Read More
    After a while you get the feeling the solar system is a pretty strange place. Not only from looking at otherworldly pictures of moons and planets sent from spacecraft, but also because scientists say so. At least a half-dozen objects, probably more, have been described… Read More
    Asters start appearing everywhere in August hereabouts and go well into fall. The biggest and brightest are the sunflowers, leaning east to west from morning to night and soaking up sunlight with big yellow-gold wheels that look for all the world like stars, which is… Read More