The Wrack

I watch a lot of nature films. My favorite bit of animal cinema involves day-old ducklings emerging from a hole in a tree trunk and plummeting 50 feet down to the leaf-strewn ground below. Their mother guides them to a nearby lake. Their real lives begin.

A tough winter gives way and spring is in the air.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 12/28/2014.

I sat in the tire shop the day before Christmas, waiting for the technician to switch my summer tires for winter ones, and scrutinized my fingers. I’d recently read an article about new biological research that pointed to a possible explanation for one of the great mysteries that has bedeviled mankind for millennia: why DO our fingers get wrinkly in the bath?