by Mary Hrovat In the shapeless but often suggestive scatter of stars across a dark night sky, humans have picked out patterns and woven countless tales around them, giving the brighter stars names for their place in these stories. The star names we use today can be fascinating but also baffling—which is not surprising, considering…

by Mary Hrovat When I was a child, my parents saw that I was shy and didn’t make friends easily. It didn’t help that we moved several times when I was very young; I went to four different schools for kindergarten through eighth grade. (I got my high school diploma by home study.) And back…

by Mary Hrovat There are worse places to be a stargazer than south-central Indiana; it’s not cloudy all the time here. I’ve spent many lovely evenings outside looking at stars and planets, and I’ve been able to see a fair number of lunar eclipses, along with the occasional conjunction (when two or more planets appear…

by Mary Hrovat I recently read the wonderfully ambiguous sentence, “The love of stone is often unrequited” in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s book Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. It inspired me to write love letters to stones. To the mysterious front-yard stone For a couple of years, when I was a very small child, you…

by Mary Hrovat The other day I was looking up an anthropological discovery I’d seen mentioned online someplace. The discovery seemed a little dodgy upon closer inspection, but in my search I found the Wikipedia page List of places with columnar jointed volcanics. I wasn’t looking for information about volcanic rocks that have undergone columnar…

by Mary Hrovat The other day, one of my grandsons asked me if I’d like to play Mario Kart with him. It goes against my grain to turn down invitations from my grandsons. However, when we’d played Mario Kart a few weeks earlier, I’d been terrible at it. His younger brother, watching from the sidelines,…

by Mary Hrovat I had my first experience with Daylight Saving Time when I was 9 or 10 years old and living in Phoenix. Most of the country was on DST, but Arizona wasn’t. I knew DST as a mysterious thing that people in other places did with their clocks that made the times for…

by Mary Hrovat There are many reasons to want to own a book. Most of them are straightforward: you can’t get it at the library, or you read the library’s copy and want your own copy to re-read or consult; you need it on hand as a reference; or it’s so beautiful that you want…

by Mary Hrovat McCormick’s Creek State Park is one of my favorite hiking spots. The creek flows through a little canyon with a waterfall in a beautiful wooded area. I’ve been visiting the park for more than 40 years. It’s a constant in my life, whether the waterfall is roaring in flood or slowed to…

by Mary Hrovat In The Art of Revision: The Last Word, Peter Ho Davies notes that writers often have multiple ways to approach the revision of a story. “The main thing,” he writes, “is not to get hung up on the choice; try one and find out. … Sometimes the only way to choose the…

by Mary Hrovat In 1995, I made two Christmas mixtapes that I labeled A Very Mary Christmas. I had recently gone through a period of wondering whether it made sense to go on celebrating Christmas, given that I’d stopped believing in the Christian story years earlier. In particular, I’d thought about whether I wanted to…

by Mary Hrovat Visualize a purple dog, the exercise said. Imagine it in great detail; picture it approaching you in a friendly way. So I did. I thought of a spaniel: long silky ears, beautiful coat, all a nice lilac color. Pale purple whiskers. The dog was friendly but not effusive. I’m not a dog…

by Mary Hrovat This summer I noticed that I was sharing a lot of sunset photos on social media. I don’t think of myself as a photographer, and I’m much more likely to share words than images. When I thought about it, I realized this wasn’t a sudden change. I’ve been taking the odd set…

by Mary Hrovat When the city of Melbourne set up email addresses for trees so that people could report problems, the trees received affectionate fan mail as well as messages about dangling limbs or other hazards. Here are some letters I’d write to trees, if I could. To the aspens in Hannagan Meadow I saw…

by Mary Hrovat Twitter is toxic, suggests autocomplete; Twitter is an echo chamber, or at best a waste of time. Twitter is a hotbed of political factionalism. Twitter can be a frightening place for people who are harassed or threatened, and it may become more so when a recently announced takeover is complete. The bullying…

by Mary Hrovat A couple of weeks ago, the main healthcare provider in my city sent me a newsletter. One of the items was a brief blurb about how laughter is good for you, with a link to “Learn More About the Benefits of Laughter.” No! If you think laughter is good for our health,…

by Mary Hrovat Everything in the universe that’s visible from your location on Earth passes by overhead every day. We’re usually able see only the stars, galaxies, planets, and so on that are in the sky when the sun is not; we become aware of them when the sun sets and Earth’s shadow rises from…

by Mary Hrovat My books are arranged more or less the way a library keeps its books, by subject and/or author, although I don’t use call numbers. I also have various piles of current and up-next and someday-soon reading. In addition, I have a loose set of idiosyncratic categories that guide my choice of what…

by Mary Hrovat 1. The public library is holding a book or DVD for me. 2. I’m going to see my older son and his family. 3. It’s dusk, and I love to walk in the twilight. 4. It’s late in the evening, a few days before Christmas 2019, and my younger son has just…

by Mary Hrovat A rose is a rose is…well, you know. Botanically, a rose is the flower of a plant in the genus Rosa in the family Rosaceae. But roses carry the weight of so much symbolism that a rose is seldom only a rose. Their symbolic luster is so intense that it casts an…