I love Philadelphia, but garbage is a definite issue here. The city cans are often overflowing, broken, or nowhere to be seen. The residents, too, are part of the problem. First of all, there are no lids on the recycling, which means that on windy days the stuff ends up in the street. Many homes do not have the space for a proper can with a lid, but to put recycling out in paper bags is pointless at best. A durable, plastic bin, which you can get at your local neighborhood association, can protect recycling from the elements. How valuable is a pile of soggy cardboard and single-use plastic, topped off with a few stray doggy bags from passers-by?
These small, quaint streets would be stunning without all the litter. The city, in my opinion, should stop aiming for “zero waste” and first deal with the waste we create. Some of the more wealthy neighborhoods, annoyed by the lack of government action, are starting to take matters into their own hands, hiring private street sweepers and putting out “community cans” in places with a lot of people traffic. In 50 years when I’m long gone, this city might finally be unparalleled, and I’ll be sorry to have missed it.
Looking at this list of rules on how to use commas, can you figure out why the commas above are where they are?
The first time I ever thought about the
term "public health," I was torturing my
younger sister with secondhand smoke,
telling her she should be grateful to get a
ride to school. I couldn't see the bigger
picture then, and I'm still working to
understand what it means to attain health as
a community. COVID has opened my eyes
further to the dangers of individualism. The
idea of helping oneself in order to help
others makes sense: put your oxygen mask on
before you put it on your child. But is it
too abstract to help others in order to help
us all? It seems that the kids have taken to
masks even as the adults shun them. Perhaps
the upside of a global pandemic is that my
son is learning about public health in a way
that has taken me decades to comprehend.
In the past year, I am noticing an increasing number of masks on the ground as litter, and I wonder if we can extend our idea of public health to that of other species and the nature around us. The plastic in masks pollutes our waters and the elastic harms wildlife. Is the litter accidental or the result of poor garbage collection? Is it the consequence of youth, just as I threw cigarettes on the ground and still managed to call myself an environmentalist? It took the American public so long to embrace masks, but now PPE pollution is threatening our environment. Finally, people are waking up to the fact that our health relies upon the health of our neighbors, but what about our neighborhood?
Living in an urban environment, I almost never see a sky full of stars or water I'd want to jump in. The trade off is that I almost never drive and that friends can just knock on our door. My sense of belonging here is deepening, but my disconnect from the natural world is not healthy. Should I pick up every mask on the ground and sew a blanket in the shape of a whale? I could just get out of town more often, save up for an electric car, take up rooftop beekeeping, or ditch single-use plastics. In any case, I'll continue to make the connections between my own well-being and the health of my community.
Here's a great link on the function of each paragraph. Most paragraphs are like circles, coming back to the main idea, and most essays are like a chain with each idea building on the next. Do my paragraphs above form complete thoughts? Do the 3 paragraphs work together?
The heron is practically showing off. Granted, my dog can’t see anything in this rain, but I'm a captive audience, gripping wet binoculars. The bird is poised to kill. She settles into different angles to hunt, switching positions like a nude model: from statue to fluid to stone. The rainwater bounces off her gray-blue back, creating the illusion of rain turning to paint. The head tilts, and the beak points the way forward, guided by matching yellow eyes. The feet follow, moving the way my Tai Chi teacher taught me to move my hands, like clouds. Then the head lifts higher and higher and the body stretches so tall it seems to be made out of gum. But she's real. When the wings open, the body lifts and turns wide, the feet drag for a moment, and with one glide the show is over. I exhale back into my body and praise my very wet dog for his patience.
Check out this link on writing about objects vs. ideas. What tangible nouns do I use? What senses do I engage? Notice the length of sentences and the ways in which I add variety to the sentence structure. Detail of image by Janet McGahan.
The boy comes downstairs in his PJ's to get a mid-morning snack during his 6-minute break from Google Classroom. We’ve hit the one year mark of COVID, and though the vaccines are coming and there’s hope on the horizon, my son’s face carries a tangible e-learning fatigue.
"Do you have any school work to submit? Any reading?" I ask. What I miss is actual paper assignments: homework I can see with my own eyes at the kitchen table. Now I have to trust an 11-year-old to actually do his assignments on time.
"No," he says, spinning in circles in his cozy socks, while dropping pretzels into his mouth. I know he wants to return to in-person learning, but he's in for a rude awakening.
"Are you sure?" I ask. "You need to get that grade up a bit." I am hoping my light pressure will encourage him to show me some of his work.
"Why do I even need good grades?" he demands, as if the question is completely original.
"So you can get into a good high school," I say, knowing the line of questions that is about to follow.
"Why do I need to get into a good high school?" he asks, eyebrows up, enjoying the idea that he may stump me soon.
"So you can get into a good college," I say, trying to strategize and think of the punchline.
"Why do I need to get into a good college?" he stops spinning to hear if I have anything new to say.
"So you can get a good job," I respond dully.
"Why,” he asks, now bored, “do I need to get a good job?" There is a moment of anticipation, the air thick with the pre-teen power of a future yet to be realized.
"So you can buy french fries and have
dogs," I retort. He nods in approval and
then remembers, dutifully, to run back to
class.
Check out this link on how to punctuate dialogue. Write your own dialogue, playing around with different dialogue tags and their placement. My tags are usually after the speaking part, but sometimes I break up the dialogue with the tag to help everything sound less robotic. Note that there are two ways to interrupt one person's dialogue with tags, depending on whether or not the first part is a full sentence. You can also use action beats instead of normal dialogue tags. Can you find the one place I did this?
I’m not a very touchy feely person, but human touch makes me feel loved. Isn’t that universal? Perhaps my early months in an incubator made me more squeamish in the face of human contact, but I've grown to savor these moments: the fleeting hugs of my 11-year-old; the way my dog leans his forehead against mine, sighs, and offers his paw; the date-night flirtation of the hands when I'm out walking with my husband after all these years. Touch reminds my body to enjoy this hard, wild life.
Love can also be felt from afar. I love a random Saturday morning phone call from a friend on the other coast or a brief weekday chat with my sister who’s just calling from the road to say hi. I imagine my friends and extended family as a sea of gossamer webs, built to keep each other safe and connected despite the tides of our lives. The Amish say that the land line disrupts family life, but cell phones can easily be silenced or put away, and often the disembodied voices on the other end can be exactly what the doctor ordered.
Is it possible to feel love without contact? In daydreams, surely. But also in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the sentience of other species. I may be a city rat, but it doesn't take much effort to get out of the urban jungle and into a real one. Hiking down to the river with my dog as the day is heating up, I worry about poison ivy and ticks. The swarms of gnats force me to wear sunglasses in the deep shade and I can’t quite enjoy myself. Still, dunking myself in cold water at the bottom of the trail reminds me that I'm just an animal. I'm instantly refreshed without a thought in my head, and I feel like I belong. Maybe I'm imagining the Earth's ruthlessness and its mercy, but my love for the planet certainly fills me with love so it isn’t in vain.
Feeling "writer's block"? Find an image you love. Does that image give you an impression of a theme? Next search "writing prompt on" + theme. I took this picture recently and wanted to write about it but couldn't think of anything until I found this writing prompt. Et voila!