It is always fun when Mother Nature shows you something you didn’t expect to see. Here, the moss patterns reveal the water currents, as clearly as if they’d been drawn with crayon. And, as I looked closer, I recognized a pattern that I’d seen it before: it resembled the curve in the bark of an…
Every now and then, nature presents us with a joke, if we are only receptive enough to catch it. Here, I found a perfect bow tie in the middle of the Dead Horse Park lagoon. Just waiting for someone to turn it around and paste it onto a beautiful package. Or perhaps, it already was the ideal…
One of the fun parts about writing the Pegasus Quincy mystery series is to revisit favorite haunts of mine in the Verde Valley. This low-water crossing is featured in the SILENCE OF WEST FORK. Peg has just discovered that a possible witness to a murder lives in a hidden shack on the other side of…
I’m sure there’s a scientific term for the refractions and reflections present in water, but to me those layers of water are endlessly fascinating. Whenever I get near a pond or a creek, my photographer’s fingers get itchy! Perhaps it is the paradox of something so clear and transparent being able to reflect light back…
Upside down, right side up, left to right, right to left. If you’ve ever noticed, we don’t often find (almost) perfect symmetry in nature. That’s why, when I found this vista, I was delighted. Symmetry creates a comforting predictability. Two by two, like the story of Madeleine living in the convent. Or Noah’s animals in the…
In the summer the sun rises early in New Hampshire. I knew there would be something to see if I set the alarm and rose to greet it. But I’d flown across country the day before and spent a good part of the evening catching up with family happenings. I didn’t want to get up….
Two ducks deep in conversation. A third trying to horn in. The odd man out. I was delighted to see Google list so many variants for this term: oddity, nonconformist, maverick, misfit, fish out of water, square peg in a round hole. One by one I tried them on for this little duck. Definitely not…
I’m a Weather Channel junkie, and this week I’ve been glued to the screen watching rivers overflow, highways flood, people rescued from rooftops and attics. Water at its most destructive. Yet I am reminded that it isn’t always this way. In the Arizona desert, water is precious, every single drop. On the trail around Courthouse…
As you drive through Oak Creek Canyon, you’ll see a sign for Ensinoso Park. There, if you stop your car and walk down the hill you’ll find this secret place. I’ve visited when it is dressed in winter white and fall gold, but nothing is so startling as the passionate green of summer, when the…
It was a cold, sunlit morning in November when I took this photograph of the crystal water at Red Rock Crossing. Behind me were the magnificent totems of Cathedral Rock, but I chose to look down, instead. The soft sandstone had been worn smooth by the creek that ebbs and flows according to the season,…