Ajax, a beagle, is the sweetest, stupidest, most stubborn dog I have ever known. He’s pretty typical of hounds, which don’t always make the greatest pets. His consciousness revolves around three things: Love, Smells and Food. When he was a tiny puppy, Ajax liked to lie splayed flat on my chest, his legs out to either side like a baby, his nose tucked under my ear. Outdoors, he would shadow my heels so closely I’d literally lose sight of him. I’d turn this way and that, thinki

There was a couple strolling past that, for me, expressed the essence of the beach. They’d been for married for a long time. You could tell in the careless way they strolled apart and yet together. He with graying hair and loose shirt fluttering over a once-firm belly. She with a sari over her bathing suit, flip-flops, and a large cloth bag. As they strolled past, ankles flush with saltwater, their fingers caught and their hands held. They were both smiling. The beach is a co

Fairy tales aside, I once fell in love with a toad. I was about ten years old and at a girls’ summer camp, where whenever we weren’t riding horses, we were pretending to be horses. I must have been building one of those interminable obstacles over which we (the girls, not the horses) jumped with our snorting elocution and prancing dressage. As I dug around for rocks, I spied at the bottom of a log, huddled in fear, a little toad. It was mostly brown and slightly green, with b

There is a river rushing fast, rushing so fast over the shallows, where blunt, gray stones mount to the surface, that a sound like steady rain fills the air. But there is no rain; only the rush of water. The pale morning deepens into purest blue overhead, and dark green leaves overhang the banks, perfectly still. In the center, over a deep channel where the surface is unruffled and the current races ineluctably onward, a young man is dipping his two-sided oar. First right, th

It was a day when the heat strikes you like a blow. The sun glared through thick air that seemed to slow and swirl around my body in a matrix of sweat and fume. I was walking up Broadway toward Central Park when I saw a man bathing in the fountain at Columbus Circle. I crossed over to get a better look. He was an older gentleman, dressed in long, loose gym shorts and a t-shirt. His grey hair was clipped short around a balding head. He held a bar of soap and as he stepped with

The definition of “emerald” is, for me, a mossy rock in the woods. I walk down the rail trail through the forest in the midday heat where the only sounds are my footfalls and the thronging buzz of Neotibicen lyricen, the Lyric Cicadas in the trees. Their tiny tymbals fill the heat like a synesthesia of temperature into song. On either side of me rise up walls of rock – some old blasting must have flattened this trail of former industry between the drifts and diluvium of Laur

I’m old enough to have a vague memory of the clacking wooden escalators in Macy’s department store on Thirty-Fourth and Broadway in New York City. It must have been Christmas – time for our annual visit to Santa Claus. In my mind, the escalator sounds like a slow-moving freight train, a two-note percussion. I remember the stained, wooden slats rising up out of the floor, the smell of glitter and wet wool, my father’s hand pressed over mine. They’ve kept a few of those wonderf