Mary Novaria

Image: leozc/Pixabay The trees in the yard are frosted like vanilla-coconut cupcakes. Pointy icicles hang from the north side of the house. Sometimes I break one off and give it to the dog, like a stick. Today those spiky rods are rock solid, and I wonder, for no particular reason, if they really have been used as weapons. Murder and melt. Evidence gone. Maybe I’ve been watching too many British crime dramas.   In Colorado, snow falls on the roof, then melts, then refreezes. This is called ice damming.   There is also a thing called ice damning .    I made it up after getting stuck near the top of the driveway last week. It was a great introduction to our home for my high school bestie who’d just flown in for the weekend. I stopped the car before reaching the top to aim my remote at the garage door, not realizing there was a layer of ice under a dusting of snow. I swear it hadn’t been there when I left for the airport earlier. When I couldn’t get traction, I beg...

My husband, John, and I came back to our new home in Colorado after a week away. Before we left, the aspens in our yard had just barely started to turn. Still mostly green, a few edges of flickering coins yielding to yellow. The evergreens in the mountains around us had been spiked with patches of gold for a few weeks. We’d driven around reveling in the glory of them, looking forward to their splendor in our first fall here. But the trees in our yard and others in our neighborhood were slower to turn. I wondered why. Altitude? Moisture? Our friend Alan had told us shortly after we’d moved in that we wouldn’t believe our luck when the grove in our yard turned that spectacular, shimmering gold. We left for Kansas City the night before we’d planned because the meteorologists predicted snow. Not just an early autumn dusting, but an actual winter storm. It wasn’t even the middle of October! But what did I expect in the Rockies? Our seven years in Los Angeles had ...

Instead of going to the gym, I got my cardio when a hummingbird flew into the house. These birds are so dumb, I thought. But then I remembered, I’m the dummy who routinely leaves the sliding doors open so the dog, a yellow Lab mix, can come in and out as she pleases. In other words, I’m lazy and I don’t want to get up to let Bella in and out every time she has a whim… which is about every ten minutes.  Leaving the doors open is one of the perks of living in a place without tons of insects. It’s a habit that never would have flown when we lived in Kansas. There, June bugs are bigger than hummingbirds. Like moths, they crash against the coach lights on the porch and invite themselves in if you so much as crack open the door to let the cat out. When the kids were young, we had what John called The Nightly Bug Watch. “Daddy! There’s a spider on the ceiling.” “Something’s buzzing in my room!” As if my night owls needed any more excuses not to go to sleep. ...