Folded Word
Exploring the world, one voice at a time.
Category: essay
As Forest
This was our territory once. Every lifetime our places and times of day diminish, but as long as food sources remain plentiful we will stay here and adapt — learning to cross carefully the hard grey roadways and the daylight hours, the noise and…
Ice and Vapour
Water doesn’t like being liquid. It much prefers its other forms — the ice of a comet or its vapour trail. Water flips through a single change of state at indeterminate temperature, and changes back again at will. But the Earth with its gravity…
Naw’leans Revisited
It was a return trip, a bucket list type of thing. My memories had faded of this city, home of a favorite author, full of amazing architecture and wonderful food. A steamboat sung and paddled on the Mississippi, memories of the riverbank quickly replaced…
Fireweed
You never notice it until the middle of summer, when the magenta flower-spikes suddenly crowd every roadside and wasteland…once they have outgrown grass and nettles, and stand tall above the lesser whites and yellows of daisies, dandelions, clovers. In Britain we call it rosebay…
Fossils
Out the back road of Charlestown, down a steep hill, across a disused railway, around a rough-brambled coastline and under the line of high tide: layers of grey mudstone, semi-eroded, open to the touch and tell their story. Some layers say little. Others retain…
Four Leafed Clover
Three, they say, is the largest number you’ll never need to count. Your eyes decide the Threeness or Unthreeness of things at a glance, along with Twoness, Oneness, Zeroality. Fourness and everything above is different, except when patterned like the spots on ladybirds and…
Folded Field Notes: NOCTURNAL
Folded Field Notes is an interactive column that explores a new ecological topic each fortnight — part writing challenge, part citizen science project — led by alternating guides with assistance from editor & ecologist JS Graustein. Will you join us? TODAY’S TOPIC : Nocturnal…
Sunset Selection
The Blizzard and Syrian Wisdom On a mid-March Monday in 2003, my students were restless with rumors of storm, thrilled that school might close on days scheduled for standardized testing, events they dread more than final exams or flu shots. Robot calls came Tuesday…
Beached Whale
She made a mistake, and died from it, sinking into the spongy, bubbling sand on the Atlantic shore of Colonsay. Careless, injured or impaired, old or tired, she came inshore too far and lost the tide, hemmed in between dune and sandbank and outcropping…
Insect
I am an insect, carapaced, visor-faced and joyful. Smaller than other travellers, I fight the air’s viscosity and feel its every rip and eddy, its waves of coolness under trees and its warmth over sunlit fields and tarmac. You hear me before you see…
