Yesterday morning, as I was leaving for work, I saw an enormous hawk take off from the top of one of the ice-damaged trees. It made a loud sound, probably because the ice-cracked branch snapped apart and together with the release of the weight. Seeing a hawk on my birthday must mean something positive, but I'm not sure what ( Read more... )

The first thing I saw when I looked out the window this morning was a bird on a branch of the pine tree. Nothing unusual about that, except that he/she was looking around nervously and doing a lot of tail-flicking, and there was something odd about the feathers on the top of the head. They were like new-grown hair. The little bird stayed an ( Read more... )

When she was a graduate student ion Anthropology, working with Ned Spicer at the University of Arizona, my Mom spent a year in a Yaqui village in Sonora, Mexico collecting stories and interviews. She later published some of the stories in a book, which came to be called "Yaqui Myths and Legends". The book is now in public domain and has been ( Read more... )