The latest casualty in the war on trees is a beautiful grove of healthy 40-year-old Zelkova trees along Rt. 9 in Framingham, Massachusetts. For years I have admired them, an oasis of shaded green nature miraculously surviving along a miles-long commercial sprawl running from Wellesley. I appreciate these trees as a hope in the wasteland…
On the day I went to see the Oak in question, my son, by happy (or perhaps sad) coincidence, put his finger on the word ‘dryad’ in a random flip of the dictionary in his mother’s classroom. Julian has been doing this most school mornings recently, in preparation for an upcoming spelling bee, but also…
Though often dismissed as false correlation (patternicity or apophenion), the effect, if not function, of seemingly meaningful coincidence is to make us sometimes take a closer look at what is presented. Such is the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4th, 1968, which occurred exactly a year to the day after he gave…