hardiness happens

USDA 1990 Hardiness Zone Map

The revised National Arbor Day Foundation 2006 Hardiness Zone Map

In 2006 the National Arbor Day Foundation published its own revised map using data that showed winter lows increasing as much as eight degrees warmer in some places. According to the foundation, the old zones have marched alarmingly northward.

Louise Ducote writing in the March | April 2009 issue of Orion Magazine about the USDA's resistance to replacing their 1990 hardiness zone map, drawn from data gathered from 1974 to 1986, with one that relies on more recent data regarding temperatures in the U.S.

ping me

Addiction, neurologists say, changes the physical shape of our brains. Each time old Z finds another text message, another headline, another update, my brain injects a little dopamine into a reward pathway.

“You’ve got mail!” squeals the computer and—whoosh!—here comes a shot of dopamine.

I feel stronger, says Z.

Five minutes pass, the dopamine fades.

I’m weak, hisses Z. I’m hungry. I need to see a picture of Joe Biden.

Anthony Doerr in Am I Still Here? Looking for validation in a wired world in the January | February issue of Orion Magazine

if we know nothing of blood

Who was it who said that to be truly happy one must think about death for at least five minutes every day?

Here's your five minutes: Joe Wilkins' Of Blood and Bone in this month's Orion Magazine.

Not a bad way to get the job done. At all.

heirloom

(…)

For weeks now, you and I
have been eating tomatoes as if the harvest’s
bounty will never cease. My breasts, too,
are tomato-heavy, the bowl of my belly
dense with the curve that will only continue
to deepen in the months ahead. Lingering
in bed this morning, I lay my hands
along the rise, palms and fingertips
listening for our daughter. Quickening,
the doctor called it, the desire
for the coming child. Imagine:
next August, we will carry our daughter
into the garden. We will hold
the fruit to her face;
we will teach her tomatoes.

The second half of Jacqueline Kolosov’s lovely poem Quickening, from the July | August 2007 issue of Orion

at the window

Broad daylight, and a man is peeing
against the building across the alley.
The storm is rolling in over the misshapen
skyline. I throw open all the windows.
Rain beads the screens, clogs
the tiny metal mesh. When the storm
has passed, water drains from the lawns,
sun streaks through the soaked trees
in marbled patches, bright draperies
of light decorate the brick apartments.
Outside, in the wet grasses, daffodils
bow in the damp breeze the way a woman
bent over a basin rinses her long, blond hair.


At the Window by Ann Hudson
Published in the March | April issue of Orion