Yesterday evening, driving home in a cluster of heavy traffic, I found myself behind an SUV with a license plate sporting a heart symbol followed by SUMMR. “I love summer,” I smiled and said aloud, because I do and I always have, though it has been decades since summer presented itself in its most memorable [...]

As I look out my office window my eye is drawn to the dying maple whose leaves, crisped and withered, have begun falling onto the brown grass below its branches. It is one in a line of other deciduous species, and it is hard to say why the others, still stalwartly green, have survived the [...]