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…

by Mary Hrovat I’ve always loved the name Sinus Iridum (Bay of Rainbows), which describes a beautiful semicircular dark feature on the face of the Moon. Browsing a lunar map reveals other names equally beautiful or evocative: Sinus Concordiae (Bay of Harmony) and Sinus Aestuum (Seething Bay), for example. Other lunar plains with watery names…

by Mary Hrovat I don’t think I saw an actual daffodil until I was 19, although I had admired the many varieties I saw pictured in bulb catalogs and even—I hesitate to admit this—written haiku about daffodils (at 14, in an English class). When my first husband and I drove through Independence, Missouri, early in…

by Mary Hrovat I love birds, and I’m obsessed with words, so I suppose it stands to reason that I’m fascinated by the names of birds. I enjoy the “what it says, it does” names such as gnatcatcher and wagtail. (Further investigation reveals that the gnatcatcher family includes gnatwrens such as the chattering gnatwren and…

by Mary Hrovat Escape. When I was a child, I read at every opportunity. If I could, I’d read on the playground; at one point, I was allowed to spend recess in the library and read there. Overall, teachers seemed unenthusiastic about the idea of a kid reading during recess. My mother, a great reader…

by Mary Hrovat Autumn is brilliant. One of the things I looked forward to when I moved to the Midwest from the desert southwest was the experience of a year with four seasons. I did not anticipate how very beautiful autumn could be, and even after 40 years in the Midwest, I can’t get enough…

by Mary Hrovat Most of the atoms in your body are hydrogen atoms. Because hydrogen atoms are so light, however, by mass you are mostly oxygen (60% to 65%). The amount of oxygen in your body varies because most of it is in the form of water (98.3% of your molecules are water molecules), and…

by Mary Hrovat Because I have a lot of experience with depression, I approached George Scialabba’s How to Be Depressed with an almost professional curiosity. Scialabba takes a creative approach to the depression memoir, blending personal essay, interview, and his own medical records, specifically, a selection of notes written by various therapists and psychiatrists who…

by Mary Hrovat One of the things that fascinates me about history is the different ways we know historical periods. We know the times we live through in a very deep way, not just the events and how they affect us, but the details of daily life. We know the slang, the jokes, the mid-list…

by Mary Hrovat I think it was in the 1980s that I first saw t-shirts showing a drawing of a spiral galaxy with an arrow indicating “You are here.” They were amusing, and the image provides a bit of cosmic context. You may be here, looking at this screen, with your to-do list and personal…

by Mary Hrovat The indicators that people use to track and understand their moods include exercise, diet, sleep, and many others. I’ve been thinking recently that my library activity surely must be correlated with my mood. I’m a frequent user of two libraries, and my checkouts and returns have a fairly small and regular ebb…

by Mary Hrovat The roof of Notre-Dame de Paris, lost in the fire of April 15, 2019, was nicknamed The Forest because it used to be one. It contained the wood of around 1300 oaks, which would have covered more than 52 acres. They were felled from 1160 to 1170, when they were likely several…

by Mary Hrovat Last weekend, a bat got into my house somehow. I first heard it in the small hours of Friday night as it scratched around somewhere near the furnace flue. I didn’t know if it was an animal settling into a new home in my attic, or if perhaps it was going out…

by Mary Hrovat When I watched the 2019 documentary on Apollo 11, it carried me back not to the summer of 1969, when it happened, but to the mid-1980s, when I was an undergrad. I was eight when Apollo 11 launched; of course I was aware of the space program and the moon landings, but…

by Mary Hrovat Nature has filled the world with “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” in the words of Charles Darwin. We humans, faced with this abundance and variety of creatures, have used our imagination to the full in giving them descriptive and often evocative names. Some animal names are fairly straightforward; the name…

by Mary Hrovat Books about how to write are so frequently described as life-changing and essential (usually by publishers, but sometimes by reviewers) that I was initially unmoved by enthusiastic reviews of Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose, by Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner. However, the praise seemed to focus on the…

by Mary Hrovat When I returned to school after my first marriage ended, I had to decide what to study. I’d been working toward a degree in history when I dropped out of a community college to get married, but I’d always been drawn to astronomy. One of the reasons I chose astronomy over history,…

by Mary Hrovat The spring ephemeral wildflowers of the Midwest are generally not large or showy. In a relatively short time during one of the less promising parts of the year, these perennial plants must put out leaves and flowers and reproduce, all before disappearing until the next spring. Still, they light up the woods…