After 700 homes were lost to raging wildfires this month, folks in Spokane have many questions about the future. Given the scale of the disaster, this might seem a minor one: When will a favorite canoeing stream in the fire zone be accessible again? I completely understand why folks are asking. The gently meandering Little Spokane River represents the close-to-nature appeal that draws many residents to Washington’s second largest city. I’ve paddled the Little Spokane in every season and know it would be an ideal place to seek solace and normality.

Of course, these aren’t normal times.

When Riverside State Park managers do open access points to the river, visitors will find that one of them, Indian Painted Rocks, has been scorched. So have those parts of the park surrounding the famous Bowl and Pitcher rapids on the main Spokane River. Because of extensive fire damage, entire trails and campgrounds are now off-limits.

News of this summer’s fires have given me flashbacks to the 1990s, when I was both a newspaper reporter and a newbie canoeist exploring Inland Northwest rivers. That decade began with a firestorm. In October of ‘91, Spokane was nearly surrounded by 92 separate blazes. Two people died and 140 homes were lost, one of which belonged to my paddling pal Jerry. His family learned, as unlucky folks in Spokane discovered this month, that “fireproof” safes are no match for a conflagration.

Unlike this year, when the West’s many wildfires are inescapably linked to climate change, I don’t recall that connection being dwelt on in 1991. But throughout the 1990s—the hottest decade on record at that point—the subject was creeping into our Spokesman-Review stories. For example, I wrote about a Washington State University zoologist who joined an Arctic expedition that looked for signs of a warming planet.

Reporter Jim Camden attended a summit of politicians, timber and mining executives, farmers and ranchers who feared they were losing ground to environmentalists. One speaker was a climatologist who scoffed at worries about climate change. “Global warming is a rat crawling in a corner,'' he said. “Most of the global warming that has been observed has been a natural phenomenon.''

Regrettably, he’s lost that argument. The winners were the Northwest scientists who gathered in Seattle in 1997. As reported by Karen Dorn Steele, they predicted:

“By 2050, the region will have wetter winters and hotter summers. Because less winter precipitation will fall as snow, there will be less snowpack accumulating at higher elevations and, therefore, less water storage. Snowmelt will occur earlier in the year due to warmer temperatures. Rivers will swell with runoff in the winter with summertime flows decreasing.”

Here we are in 2026 and those changes are well underway. Our fires are supersized and don’t stay conveniently in the distant mountains. Because of regional drought and early spring thaws, many rivers are too shallow to canoe, kayak or raft by mid-summer.

Which brings me back to the Little Spokane River. One of its many attributes is that it is spring-fed, with a beckoning current year-round. I live on the other side of the state now, but will be watching for news that Eastern Washington paddlers are back on the Little Spokane. Come next spring, I bet they will see green shoots emerging from the char at Indian Painted Rocks.

Those of us afflicted with adhesive arachnoiditis have questions. What’s the best way to treat this often debilitating nerve damage? Dare we hope for a cure? And just how many of us are there, anyway?

In the United States, one key to finding all three answers lies in the creation of a diagnostic code specifically for arachnoiditis. The International Classification of Diseases system, known as the ICD-11, already has one. But here in the U.S., where the coding system is called ICD-10-CM, doctors who diagnose arachnoiditis are forced to put it into the broad category of “Meningitis, Unspecified.” (The condition results from chronic inflammation of a webbed arachnoid layer of the meninges, a sheath of tissue surrounding the cerebral spinal fluid.)

Why do diagnostic codes matter? Because they are used for more than billing purposes. Codes let public health officials track outbreaks of disease and health trends across regions and time. Codes help doctors communicate a diagnosis clearly to other providers, which is vital as patients hopscotch through medical systems. Codes also let researchers pull population-level groups from health records and insurance claims databases to study how common a disease is. Armed with that information, they can examine which ailments co-exist in a group of patients, and what the outcome of treatments have been.

Just as importantly, coding data can inform research funding decisions and treatment guidelines. Without it, a disease is invisible. That’s why communities of rare disease patients have fought for specific codes. For example, the Kabuki Syndrome Foundation led a campaign to secure a unique ICD-10-CM code for that rare condition characterized by distinctive facial features, intellectual disability and skeletal abnormalities. Until 2025, Kabuki Syndrome was lumped in with a catch-all code for congenital malformations.

The next deadline for submitting proposals to the Centers for Disease Control apparently hasn’t been announced. Members of the public, representatives from the private sector, and government employees can submit. After a virtual public meeting next spring, followed by a public comment period, the reviewing committee will announce its decisions.

A submission in support of an arachnoiditis code is only likely to succeed if it has combined requests from the medical and patient communities. I would expect supporters to include the Arachnoiditis Hope foundation, Arachnoiditis United, and Arachnoiditis and Chronic Meningitis Collaborative Research Network. Perhaps someone in the government would step up. Arachnoiditis was the subject of a 2025 lecture by John D. Heiss National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Since first writing about my probably not-so-rare disease, I’ve become ever more convinced that getting a specific diagnostic code is low-hanging fruit as we reach for recognition, prevention and treatment of arachnoiditis.

I watched as friends worked in tandem to hoist the Stars and Stripes at Washington’s New Dungeness Lighthouse. It was gray and blustery much of that week that we spent as volunteer guides and groundskeepers, but staying at the historic site was a privilege even when the skies were gray. That’s pretty much how I feel about being in the United States now. Government, culture, health care, education…it’s all stormy, but I still feel lucky to be here.

What got me looking through my files for flag pictures was a text exchange with my friend, Jim. He is outraged by the current administration, but also annoyed when he sees an American flag displayed upside down as a sign that the nation is in distress. It annoys me, too. That said, I’m glad there is no law against displaying the flag in any manner. The Supreme Court wisely concluded in 1989 that flag displays are protected under the First Amendment right to free speech. (Could the justices have imagined a UFC contender wrapped in a flag in the White House foyer, ready to wrestle on the south lawn?)

Maybe Jim and I are irked by improper display of the flag because we share something else in common. Both of our fathers were on B-17 bombing crews in Europe during World War II. Their mission was to rescue the world from Hitler’s fascism. They’d be confused to hear “antifa” described as a bad thing.

Jim’s father was a bombardier/navigator on a plane that was shot down. “He and his tail gunner were the only survivors, the plane disintegrating around them,” Jim told me. “Dad spent 14 months as a POW.” My own father was a co-pilot on 35 missions. His plane returned to England with flak damage, but always did come back.

When Dad was 96, he went on an Honor Flight to see the veterans’ memorials in Washington, D.C. One of my favorite pictures of Old Glory shows Mom clutching a small flag when she stayed up late to welcome him home at the airport. I wish I had a picture of her greeting his train in 1945, when he returned from the war. I asked her once if the station was crowded with servicemen that day. She said she didn’t remember because she only had eyes for one passenger.

At 102, Mom’s eyes aren’t so good these days. Her hearing isn’t the best, either, though she still enjoys music. When I visited her assisted living home this spring, we sat together during a dining room performance by a singer/guitarist. He played old favorites and mom tapped her foot to the beat of “Folsom Prison” and “You Are My Sunshine.” But there was only one tune she sang along to: “God Bless America.”

Have you ever gone to an appointment with a new doctor, hoping to meet a compassionate Patch Adams? Only to find Dr. Doom in the exam room? My experience hasn’t been that extreme, but there are certainly physicians I wouldn’t recommend. Or revisit.

I say this in the wake of my annual checkup with a primary care doc who cheerfully answered my inevitable list of questions and remembered that my mom is 102, suggesting I may have another 30 years ahead (oy). After four years, she knows me. When I asked if she would continue being my doctor as I age, she said “I’m not going anywhere.” Good to know! Because finding and adjusting to a new health care provider can be fraught.

In fact, among those of us with adhesive arachnoiditis, there are few hotter topics than where to find someone willing to treat our chronic, uncommon and often debilitating form of nerve damage. One man told me that a new doctor literally backed out of the exam room upon seeing the arachnoiditis diagnosis on his chart.

I’ve come to think of office visits as stage plays. That opening act—that first appointment—features two characters who are wary of each other. Let’s say the patient has been disappointed by previous doctors and is worried about the cost of treatment. Her emotions are rubbed raw by unrelieved pain. On top of all that, she has little trust in what my pain specialist calls, with an ironic eye roll, “our health care system.” (One study determined that, from 2020 to 2024, public trust in doctors and hospitals plummeted from 71 to 40 percent.)

The doctor, meanwhile, has dealt with all manner of personalities and diagnoses that day and has no idea what awaits behind the exam room door. He hasn’t had sufficient time to even read the patient’s lengthy chart because he was busy dealing with insurance companies on top of a packed schedule.

There may be too much ego or two few communication skills present in an exam room. A doctor’s deep experience—in general, a good thing—can get in the way of seeing a patient as an individual who might differ significantly from previous patients with similar symptoms. I once saw a doctor who clearly was brilliant. But she bombarded me with questions, then didn’t give me time to properly answer them.

I do see improvement in doctors’ acceptance of patients who have done their own health research. We’ve come a long way since nearly 20 years ago, when I asked an informed question of a doctor who responded, “Oh, you’re one of those internet people.” In the case of rare diseases, patients are quite likely to know more about their condition than the physician does. That should be a chance for mutual problem solving, not wisecracks about Dr. Google.

Sure, there are genuine cases of “cyberchondria.” Some people are bound to misdiagnose themselves and catastrophize. But that seems like a lesser problem than having people show up at clinics totally uneducated on matters of health.

If I were a physician, I might especially relish the challenging cases. But I’m not sure I would have the emotional stamina that the job requires, especially if it involved seeing people in pain, day in and day out. Simply dealing with an endless parade of quirky humans could be taxing.

Let’s hope there are always doctors who get enough satisfaction out of helping people that they’re willing to put up with the downsides and stick with the profession. We need them.

I’m constantly winnowing my name from email lists. But I welcomed a new one from the group Grandparents for Vaccines. It was founded by Arthur Lavin, a retired pediatrician who wants elders to share their memories of diseases that would, if sanity prevailed, be banished from American shores by now.

When I was in grade school, measles and mumps were common. I have a scar on my forehead as souvenir of itchy chicken pox. But when I think of diseases of my youth, it’s polio that comes to mind.

Dr. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was released to the public in 1955. Microbiologist Albert Sabin’s version, made available in 1961, not only offered more protection but, to the relief of every kid I knew, was delivered in a sugar cube instead of a shot. We lined up at a high school to get our doses, which were handed to us in tiny paper cups. The U.S. returned to injectable polio vaccine in 1999 because the altered live vaccine in oral doses carries a tiny but real chance of infection.

When the Salk vaccine was announced, there was so much excitement that Americans gathered in movie theaters to learn about it. People had been scared by newsreel pictures of children lying in iron lungs, those mechanical ventilators that stimulated breathing. Parents jumped at the chance to get their kids vaccinated. They would have been dismayed that so many 21st Century parents are misled to the point of avoiding time-proven preventive measures.

When I was fact-checking the polio vaccine release dates, I learned that most people who get the virus have no symptoms. My brother-in-law, George, was one of the unlucky ones. He escaped early death and complete lower-body paralysis (though not the iron lung) and went on to become a teacher and para-athlete. But as he aged, he suffered weakness brought on by post-polio syndrome. People who suffer long Covid will recognize the curse of surviving the first round of a disease only to have it haunt you later on. George, his muscles and lungs compromised by that early epidemic, succumbed to Covid-19 in his 70s. He left behind eight grandchildren.

If you’re interested in the mission of Grandparents for Vaccines, check out this NBC News report.

Speaking of memories, I once interviewed an Idaho man in his 90s who had survived the 1919 flu epidemic. Of course, there was no vaccine for that worldwide plague. He recalled how influenza struck down healthy young adults. And how school buildings and fraternal halls were turned into infirmaries. I can’t help but wonder, now that an anti-vaccine zealot leads our Department of Health and Human Services, if there will one day be rows of hospital beds filling a Washington D.C. ballroom.

No professional field, maybe not even the military, likes acronyms more than medicine does. Consider NBSP (nature-based social prescriptions) and NINP (non-invasive, non-pharmacological therapies). I found those in articles that describe the effectiveness of treatments that aren’t drugs or surgery.

Given my nerve damage that resulted from spinal surgery, I’m especially intrigued by the prospect of nature-based prescriptions. It’s well documented that being in a natural environment is good for our psyches. But can it relieve chronic pain? An analysis in the journal Nature Mental Health found 62 studies in 21 countries that asked people to report how exposure to nature influenced their pain. Many people reported some reduction, although the studies were considered less than rigorous.

It would be hard to design such a gold-standard study, given how tough it is to evaluate levels of misery. Besides, lots of folks in pain have trouble moving around their home, much less hiking a forest trail. For that reason I suggest bringing nature indoors via a programmable bed tent. It would be controlled with a flashlight that had extra buttons.

This tent would come in four sizes: twin, double, queen and king. The person nestled inside could choose to look skyward through virtual mesh at a brilliant Milky Way, or pick a cozy “rain fly” setting and be lulled by the pit-pit-patter of raindrops. A woodland setting would induce pine scent and the occasional hoot of an owl. A beach setting would deliver a sea breeze and the intermittent cry of a gull.

The occupants of these tents would sink into the mattress of their choice, under their favorite blankets. They wouldn’t have to inflate a sleeping pad or squirm inside a sleeping bag. In fact, they would deal with none of the downsides of outdoor tents. No mosquitoes that sneak inside; no menacing wind threatening to pull up the stakes; no leaky seams or flooded campsites. Certainly no marauding wildlife.

If a nature study was taking place via the bed tent, research subjects would use the flashlight buttons to record their pain levels before, during and after treatment. If the tent were simply a home medical device, it would, of course, be covered by insurance.

I hope some entrepreneur runs with this idea. Meanwhile, I will take a nature cure whenever I can. I don’t need a scientific paper to tell me that the scent of cedar is relaxing and the murmur of a river is a pleasant distraction. Tension release and a happily occupied mind are fixtures in my pain-fighting toolkit.

Even if my outdoor tenting days are history.

FDA Approves First commercially Produced Birth Control Pill (1960): The pill that causes headaches, blood clots, nausea, strokes, sore breasts, bloating, hormonal imbalances, depression and bleeding in some women is hailed as a huge triumph. — From “History of the Women’s Rights Movement,” The Onion, March-April 2026

I laughed out loud at that truism/satire, because mine was the first generation of women to benefit from those bubble packs of freedom, aka birth control pills. What we desired wasn’t just long-haired, bell-bottomed boys, but also freedom. Education. Careers. Kids when we were ready for them.

We knew we were living in revolutionary times. We had more options than our moms, whose lives had been much like their mothers’, but with Maytags instead of wringer washers. My own artistic mom dreamed of being a fashion designer but could only pour her talents into outfitting her nine children. I wanted to be a writer and no one suggested I couldn’t do it.

I was first hired by Idaho’s largest newspaper to work in what had been, until recently, the Women’s Department. By the mid-’70s, it was called the Family Living Department. Eventually, it was just the generic features department.

One of my early assignments was to profile the area’s first licensed female electrician. I rolled my eyes. Weren’t we past the point of making a big deal about women doing “men’s jobs”?

Oh, the innocence of youth. I just looked up how many electricians are women now. It’s a whopping 2.4%.

I was learning that a journalist’s best defense against lame story assignments is to come up with your own. I successfully pitched this idea to my editor: I would test the premise of the new Equal Credit Opportunity Act and see if a woman actually can get consumer credit in her own name.

Boise had several downtown department stores in those days of yore. I strolled into each and applied for a line of credit on the basis of my $150 weekly salary. All went smoothly until, at J.C. Penney, the young clerk handed the application form back, saying I had filled out the “spouse” line incorrectly. I was puzzled. I had clearly printed my husband’s name.

“You’re the spouse,” she explained, as if I were a foreign-language speaker who had misinterpreted the word.

I don’t recall how we resolved the spousal verbiage standoff, but Penney’s did extend me credit.

These days, women have 25% more credit cards than men. But men are far more confident that they can pay the balance. Maybe that’s because we earn, on average, 85% of what men make.

The gender pay gap has dramatically narrowed over the last 50 years. That’s one reason that I’ve been optimistic about women’s steady march toward equality. I never considered the possibility that a presidential administration would declare all-out war on women (actually, on all non-white-males). That it would fire distinguished military officers for no obvious reason other than their gender. That it would search-and-delete research applications that mention the very words “women” or “gender.”

I should have known there were still big forces working against women’s progress. After all, there’s a reason the Equal Rights Amendment has never been added to the Constitution. It was first introduced in Congress in 1923. Talk about a long road.

When I was a rookie reporter, men had already walked on the moon. The Artemis II mission gives me hope that a woman’s footprints will be among the next ones kicking up lunar dust. Or is this administration already overriding NASA’s recent egalitarian approach to selection of the next space crew?

When the Artemis capsule splashed down last week, NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya celebrated the successful mission but added “the work ahead is greater than the work behind us. It always is.” Maybe we women’s libbers should take that for our motto.

After being diagnosed with adhesive arachnoiditis, I found support groups on Facebook. I soon realized that, among these chronic pain patients, no subject is touchier than the use of opioid medications. Posts range from “Opioids are not the answer!” to “only opioids and a spinal cord stimulator help me get out of bed” to pleas of support for doctors in legal trouble for allegedly over-prescribing narcotic painkillers.

I resolved to avoid writing about opioid drugs, preferring to keep the focus on our under-reported and so far incurable condition. But I approach health topics as a reporter/patient. And what kind of reporter would pretend not to see an elephant lurking in the waiting room? Maybe not me, after all. And certainly not Pat Anson, editor/publisher of the Pain News Network (PNN).

Anson asks a thought-provoking question: Is dependence on opioids that terrible? He has reached this conclusion:

“It is if it kills you. It is if it makes you harmful to yourself or other people. But not if it means people can still work, have a social life, do their own shopping and household chores.”

Addiction, as we commonly use the word, relates to opioid misuse disorder—a neuropsychiatric condition that involves continuation on drugs despite harm. It involves craving, obsession and, too often, criminality. That is different from physical reliance on prescribed drugs to control long-term pain.

Anson began to see the distinction in 2011. He’d spent decades as a broadcast journalist, but that year he started covering pain care for National Pain Report. He didn’t know much about opioids and, like most everyone else, had a negative view of them. But then he started hearing from patients in unrelenting pain.

“Over time, I learned from patients in their comments and emails how essential opioids can be to have a semi-normal life and that most are not harmed by them,” he told me. “It opened my eyes, as that is not the popular narrative.”

When the for-profit National Pain Report didn’t survive, Anson launched the Pain News Network in 2015 as a nonprofit online news service that covers chronic pain and illness. Since then, the number of opioid prescriptions has steadily decreased. But, tragically, misuse of prescription opioids and heroin was soon surpassed by synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl.

All 50 states govern the dispensing of opioid drugs. Their laws differ dramatically. Most do acknowledge the difference between acute pain, such as that felt immediately after surgery or injury, and chronic pain, which needs long-term management. The federal government only offers guidelines, most recently updated in 2022.

PNN’s biggest benefactor has been the Arachnoiditis Hope Foundation. Anson also relies on advertising support. In addition to his own reporting on pain-related topics, PNN features regular contributors who are pain patients.

“Mainstream media mainly approaches things from the pharmaceutical industry, doctors and lawyers,” he said. “Hardly anyone asks patients about this.”

These days, there are fewer reporters asking anyone about pain. As Anson points out, “coverage of health care has taken a swan dive in the traditional media.”

PNN increasingly reports on alternative therapies for pain. Anson notes that lawmakers are turning their attention to kratom, a supplement sold as an energy booster, mood lifter and pain reliever. Some chronic pain patients find it helpful and fear it will be banned.

Anson, a senior citizen like me, has had his share of aches and pains but doesn’t use opioids or consider himself a chronic pain sufferer.

As for me, I continue to cope with nerve damage done during a 2024 spinal fusion. I get some pain relief from an antidepressant that suppresses neuropathic pain, and lead a mostly normal if not comfortable life. I tried two opioid drugs, oxycodone and buprenorphine, but found them of minimal use and not worth the side effects.

Like Anson, I would describe myself as agnostic about opioids. They help some people who have likely tried every other remedy. I can only imagine the desperation of patients suddenly deprived of pain medication because, as laws changed, their doctors were afraid to prescribe it.

The decision whether to use any drug should be between doctor and patient. To anyone who would harshly judge another for seeking relief from incessant pain—I can only say, you have never really felt it.

.

In the early 2000s, I was communications director at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Our faculty members occasionally met with officers in charge of training future military leaders in the campus ROTC program. I sat in once or twice. If you just imagined a tense peaceniks vs. warriors scene, you’d be wrong. These were noon chats around a conference table, brown bag lunches optional. Everyone seemed keenly interested in the other team’s point of view. A main topic of conversation was the post-9/11 war on terror. Boots were on the ground in Iraq.

Among those present was Professor David Cortright, who was in the Army during the Vietnam War. He didn’t serve overseas, but what he heard from returning soldiers influenced his decision to join fellow GIs who were protesting the war. The government, to put it lightly, frowned on their activities. David persisted and has devoted his life to disarmament and the prevention of war.

After one ROTC meetup, I walked back across the leafy campus with David. I asked if he held out hope that the U.S. would get out of the Middle East quagmire. He said no. He sounded weary, disheartened.

A few years later, the term “forever wars” entered our national vocabulary.

I recall the conversation because this is National Vietnam Veterans Day and because the United States is engaged in another undeclared war, this time with Iran.

The Vietnam vet who I knew best was the late artist Grady Myers. He was drafted in 1968, the same year as David, with only a vague idea why the U.S. was fighting in Vietnam. He could have told you chapter and verse about World War II, in which his father served, but didn’t know the name of Gen. William Westmoreland, who was then Army Chief of Staff.

He wasn’t anti-war or pro-war going into it. But after nearly dying in the Plei Trap Valley, Grady threatened to toss a friend across the Canadian border if he didn’t follow through with his plan to apply for conscientious objector status and avoid going to ‘Nam.

Grady, my ex-husband, didn’t regret his military service. Yet he hated being put in a kill-or-be-killed situation for a cause he didn’t even understand. As I think about what today’s troops are being asked to do, I remember the feel of his bullet wounds under my fingers.

Grady earned a Purple Heart, but was most proud of his Combat Infantry Badge. He titled the above drawing “Still Life with CIB.” It is in the collection of the National Veterans Art Museum and is reproduced in his memoir, Boocoo Dinky Dow: My short, crazy Vietnam War.

Producer Ashley Schaifer said of the movie Train Dreams: “We didn’t have enough days, we didn’t have enough money, but we all made it work.”

Did they ever. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, even though it was up against movies that cost 10 times as much to make and even though its source material was challenging. Given the long odds against being nominated, everyone involved was a winner even though no one took home a gold statue.

I’m actually relieved that “Train Dreams” didn’t win an on Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. That’s because I had head-shaking moments while watching it. They involved dialogue. I hadn’t yet read the novella “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson, but I knew his reputation as a writer’s writer. I would have placed a winning bet that he did not put environmental lectures in the mouths of his characters.

“Train Dreams” is the story of a solitary man who survived great tragedy. Johnson wrote that Robert Grainier, a laborer who died without anyone noticing, “lived more than 80 years, well into the 1960s.” With simple brushstrokes of words, in a mere 116 paperback pages, Johnson captures both Grainier’s humanity and the enormous changes happening around his quiet outpost in the woods.

What’s not in those pages is a campfire conversation in which a logger declares that “there’s enough trees for us to cut for a thousand years,” and that by the time the ancient giants have been cut down, more would have grown to replace them. Old-timer Arn Peeples responds, saying he thought that way when he was young, too. But now he knows the trees will be gone and suggests there will be consequences. Earlier he had spoken of the damage it does a man’s soul to cut down a 500-year-old tree. Now, he opines: “This world is intricately stitched together, boys, every thread we pull we know not how it affects the design of things.”

The little speech felt out of place, but I told myself to chill out. Even if those words weren’t actually in the novel, I thought, there were certainly people who knew in the early 20th Century that the stands of ancient trees weren’t infinite. How many of those people expounded on that fact in poetic language to their fellow lumberjacks, it’s hard to say.

Then came the scene in which Grainier is talking to a widowed Forest Service employee named Claire Thompson. They are in a fire lookout, gazing at the landscape. Her face lit by the glow of the setting sun, Claire explains how everything in the forest is connected to everything else, how the smallest insect is as vital as the river. Earlier, perched on a horse-drawn wagon, she explained how the region’s lakes were created after a giant ice dam burst. Claire, we are told, served as a nurse in the Great War. It’s possible she had heard the theory of the catastrophic Great Missoula Floods during the years depicted in the film, though it was long debated among geologists and not settled science until the 1970s. Calculating that timeline was, for this audience of one, a distraction from the movie.

Clint Bentley, the director and co-screenwriter, insisted on filming in Washington State for the sake of authenticity. Yet, in what seems to me a contradiction, he created the Forest Service character for the express purpose of delivering an ecology lesson, as he explained in a recent New York Times interview. Lost in the process was one of the most delightful interactions in the novella, in which a very different widow named Claire sizes up two men as husband material and finds them lacking.

What would the late Denis Johnson think about the insertion of environmental lessons into his story? There’s no way to be sure, though authors who are happy with how their books are adapted to the screen seem outnumbered by those who are miserable about it.

Johnson died in 2017. I’m willing to be disgruntled on his behalf. I spent a chunk of my career writing about Northwest forest issues. But “Train Dreams” is art, not journalism or documentary. If the filmmakers had let the landscape and the original characters speak for themselves, they would have better served both Nature and Johnson’s little masterpiece.

It is a question I’ve long had but never bothered to look up: How do drugs get their names? Then I heard about palmitoylethanolamide and, given it has the longest name of anything I ever considered consuming, I had a solid reason to pursue the question.

PEA, as the tongue-twister is unsurprisingly known, isn’t a prescription drug. It’s a chemical made from fat, one found naturally in our bodies and some foods. PEA, which is sold as an over-the-counter supplement, can bind to cells in the body and reduce inflammation and pain. When a fellow arachnoiditis sufferer called it to my attention, I read up on it.

PEA was identified in the 1950s, after doctors observed that children who ate eggs were less likely to get rheumatic fever. Early studies found PEA not only in the fatty solids of egg yolks, but also in components of peanuts and soybean lecithin. And they found that the compound had anti-inflammatory effects in animal models. Researchers also noticed it could reduce allergic reactions, leading to early clinical trials for conditions like influenza and the common cold.

Interest in PEA dropped off for two decades. It was revived thanks in large part to Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist Rita Levi-Montalcini. Her work in the 1990s and 2000s helped establish PEA's role in modulating mast cells, which are key players in inflammation and allergic responses. She was a huge fan of PEA, reportedly taking it herself. She lived to be 103.

Interest in PEA is strong and getting stronger. For two recent reports, researchers analyzed scores of studies, tabulated the results of the rigorous ones, and reached upbeat conclusions. The 2023 meta-analysis for the Swiss journal Nutrients looked at PEA’s affect on chronic pain, and found “PEA was associated with improved functional status and quality of life in many studies, while reported side effects were essentially negligible.” The 2025 meta-analysis published by the journal Nutrition Reviews “confirmed that PEA effectively reduces pain and enhances quality of life, with significant benefits observed within 4-6 weeks of treatment. Palmitoylethanolamide is a promising alternative to chronic opioid analgesics, potentially reducing the risk of opioid abuse and dependency.”

To make PEA more effective, researchers have figured out how to make it more available in the body. Thus “micronized,” PEA is now available in some countries as a prescription drug. Why didn’t that happen earlier? For one thing, drug manufacturers apparently didn’t see great promise in it. And chemists described PEA before the United States and WHO came up with national and international naming councils, which give drugs generic names such as ibuprofen.

Manufacturing marketing teams are the ones who come up with brand names. Though I find it hard to picture a room full of those folks looking at PowerPoint slides, rubbing their chins thoughtfully until someone exclaims “Yes! Let’s call it Advil! That certainly says ‘Be gone, demon headache’ to me!”

Am I taking PEA? Yes, dear reader, I am. For the past three weeks. Because the research says it takes four to six weeks to see results, I have nothing to report. Perhaps PEA won’t show definitive improvement but work in the background to keep my inflammatory disease from getting worse. I would certainly take that outcome from a supplement that is readily available, doesn’t break the bank, and has no side effects.

A big bonus from researching PEA: Learning about Rita Levi-Montalcini. She is a prime candidate for a biopic. An Italian powerhouse who not only nabbed a Nobel and was so honored in Italy that they made her a senator-for-life, she survived both the Nazis and a father who frowned upon her desire to study science. After all, that would hurt her chances of becoming a wife and having a family. She did neither, but proclaimed herself quite happy with how her long life turned out. Bravo, Rita.

.

For most of my driving life, I’ve owned vehicles good for carrying kids and outdoor gear. A series of low-slung Subaru, Toyota and Volkswagen station wagons made it easy to car-top canoes and kayaks. But as my paycheck career was winding down, my worries about climate change were ramping up. Life here in the Northwest is changing dramatically thanks to melting glaciers, wildfires and heat waves. By 2022, I was shopping for an EV to reduce my carbon footprint and, quite honestly, stop spending money at the gas pump.

I would have gladly purchased another small wagon, but apparently carmakers only find Europeans worthy of those. I didn’t need an SUV, which would cost more and have a shorter driving range than a sedan.

By December 2024, I’d found my next ride: a used Hyundai Ioniq 6. It’s spacious, peppy and fun to drive. I expected that. What I hadn’t foreseen was that its sleek lines and sporty spoiler give it sex appeal. My first hint of this came before I drove it off the lot. A young CarMax employee grinned broadly as he poked his head in the passenger window to say “I really want your car.” I felt like one cool grandma.

Since then, men of varying ages have stopped me in parking lots to compliment my silver steed. They also ask questions. Do you have a home charger? What kind of range does it get? (Yes, and 300 miles). The guys nod and smile and wish me a good day.

Such neighborly conversations are so American. But on the national scene, we can’t even talk cars these days without politics intruding. It breaks my heart and my brain that federal powers-that-be have branded EVs as a sign of left-wing fanaticism rather than a consumer choice. The government has ended incentives to buy and manufacture EVs, so carmakers are doing U-turns away from considerable investments. With a 100% tariff effectively banning inexpensive Chinese cars, we have even fewer electric options. And higher prices.

All of that means slower progress toward decreasing the nearly 30% of greenhouses gases that come from transportation in this country. Other important stats: 73% of Americans believe climate change is happening and 64% are worried about it. Those not convinced of the link between disasters and global warming surely care about the air they breathe. According to a new study, EVs are already improving air quality. Broader EV adoption, which will come eventually with better charging infrastructure, could improve everyone’s health.

Decades ago, I stood beside a winding mountain road in Idaho, interviewing a wildlife biologist while admiring the surging river below us. We were discussing an historic dam that had blocked the river. It only briefly served the mining company that built it, but kept generations of salmon from reaching their prime spawning grounds.

As we talked about the disastrous impact of dams on fish populations, I wondered aloud what next big mistake humans would make.

“That’s easy,” the scientist said. Then he thumped the hood of his pickup.

Soon after I wrote about my frustration with the standard 1-to-10 pain scale, I saw a Facebook post by a woman who is happy with the app she uses to track her chronic pain. Her recommendation sent me to the app store, where I found an array of similar products. They vary in purpose and complexity, function and price. As I was shopping, I got an email from the owner of Nanolume, the very app that the Facebooker recommended. His name is Ron Harbut. I was intrigued not only because he is a pain specialist, but also because he has the same source of chronic pain as me: adhesive arachnoiditis.

I soon learned about another pain patient who created an app called Chronic Insights. His name is James Allen and he lives in England. We made plans for a video chat.

But first, I talked to Dr. Harbut.

When the Arkansas doctor was seeing patients with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, they would struggle to describe their pain. And he had limited time to help them. “Most pain physicians work on the clock,” he said. “You need to see patients as fast as you can to keep up with the schedule.”

To remedy the situation, Dr. Harbut gave patients a piece of paper with an outline of the body, front and back. He asked them to mark the location of the pain, then describe it. Back, legs, feet? Burning, aching, throbbing? Such pain mapping, which became common in the late 20th century, helps a doctor pin down the cause of someone’s misery. Around 2011, Dr. Harbut decided it was too cumbersome to manage all those pieces of paper. “I said, hey, I can do this with a mobile app.”

He successfully pitched the idea to a software startup. He enjoyed the ensuing storyboarding and roundtable discussions, telling the developers and marketers: “It’s got to be interesting, as fun as it can be for someone in pain.”

The app also needed to be easy to use and give patients a way to share information with their doctors.

The resulting product, released in 2014 and since updated, allows users to visually map their pain on a human figure, using their fingertips instead of pencils. The digital approach gives the product its name: “Nano” for very small and “lumen” for units of light. Users can indicate type, location, intensity and coverage area. They can also log their medications, activities and weather—all factors that can affect pain levels—and export files as password-protected printable files.

Artificial intelligence could take Nanolume to the next level by suggesting to patients the possible causes of their pain, Dr. Harbut said. He plans to find a university to partner with him on the next step, incorporating AI. I’m impressed that he’s still plugging away at his creation in the face of his own pain. As was the case with me, his arachnoiditis resulted from late-in-life back surgery.

Nanolume is a pretty streamlined tool. Which, I think, is part of its value. In contrast, James Allen’s Chronic Insights has many more features, which also has advantages.

Allen was only 17 when he began to show symptoms of axial spondyloarthritis, another progressive inflammatory disease. Now 44, he’s had to give up his work as an IT consultant. But his software skills allow him to work for himself, constantly refining the app that he released in 2019. He hears daily from customers, most of whom are in the United States. They often ask him to update his app to reflect their particular health problem.

“There are an overwhelming number of health conditions,” Allen told me. “You realize how varied people’s needs are. I try for an app that accommodates everybody. The more I do that, the more complicated it is. Which works against simplicity.”

He chose the comprehensive approach. To keep things user-friendly, he provides a user manual, 3-D demo and video instructions. Thanks to AI, there are five language translations. Users can create tags that help them track multiple conditions. They can sync the app to their Apple watch, record health questionnaires, input blood and urine tests, describe their moods and more. Like most pain apps, Chronic Insights can track medications and pull in weather data.

Every variable is one that might help patients figure out why some pain days are worse than others. So far, Allen hasn’t personally had luck with that. Neither have I.

Privacy matters! Nanolume and Chronic Insights do not store health data. It remains only on customers’ devices. Few of use are consistent about reading the fine print, but I encourage you to check the privacy information of any health app you use.

Do you ever come across an uncommon word, only to see or hear it again in quick succession? It’s the kind of coincidence that makes you cock your head like a curious pooch and think, “Huh, that’s odd.” That was my response when I came across the word “Victrola” in two very different places.

The first place was the book “In Lincoln’s Shadow: The 1908 Race Riot in Springfield, Illinois,” in which author Roberta Senechal de la Roche combined deep research with good storytelling. And what a story it is. As the prairie city was about to celebrate the 100th birthday of its martyred native son, the president known as the “great emancipator,” a White woman falsely claimed that a Black man had raped her. When police spirited the suspect away from the city jail for his protection, more than 100 Whites went on a rampage. They wrecked Black-owned businesses, burned down neighborhoods, lynched two Black men and injured many others. The riot is remembered mostly because it inspired the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Springfield is my hometown. I learned to drive on the streets mapped out in the book. I can picture where the 1908 events happened, both downtown and in the poor neighborhood where most of Springfield’s Blacks lived. But, as In Lincoln’s Shadow explains, there were middle-class Black families on the other side of town. Some of those men worked at the Statehouse, where government jobs offered status and security. Their wives organized dances and did charitable works. They mingled with White neighbors. In her account of growing up in such a family, Margaret Ferguson recalled friends coming to their parlor to play the new wind-up Victrola. That early record player with its giant fluted horn had just burst on the national scene. It was quite the status symbol.

Most Black men in Springfield worked in the coal mines that underpinned the local economy. So did most of the recent European immigrants who, in the 1920s, came to include my Sicilian grandfather. It strikes me that, whatever color their skin when they descended into the mines, the workers came up covered in black dust. They did not go home to luxury items.

There was at least one Victrola on the German-American side of my family. I know because my great-grandfather Charles specifically bequeathed one to his wife, Kate, along with his Cincinnati house and such items as “linen and napery” and three watches. When I came across his 1910 will, I recalled Mom’s story about hard feelings within her family. They were caused by the fact that Kate was great-grandfather’s younger second wife and had been his mistress before the death of my great-grandmother in 1905. His daughter Rose was especially displeased with this sequence of events.

Rose escaped what must have been tension in her parents’ house by marrying my grandfather, Anthony. He was a church musician and teacher whose career took him from the Ohio River Valley to Richmond, Indiana. Their Catholicism made them a target of the newly revitalized Ku Klux Klan, which was virulent in the area and extended its hatred to religion as well as race. So my grandparents packed up their large family in the ‘20s and moved to Springfield. Which is where my parents met.

Neither my German nor Italian grandparents lived far from the scenes of 1908 riot, though it’s possible they never learned that part of local history. It wasn’t until 2024 that the national monument was designated to commemorate the event. It so far consists of a website and a sign.

Thanks to a 20-year-old book and historic probate records, I know more about the past. And I have a happy mental image to connect with the start of the 20th Century—that of ladies, gents and children in a parlor. The room is filled with Victorian furniture and music coming magically, if scratchily, from a newfangled machine.

British artist Francis Barraud painted “His Master’s Voice,” which became one of the most famous commercial logos in the world. The image, which depicts a dog named Nipper, ear cocked as he listens to a wind-up disc gramophone, helped popularize the fledgling field of sound recording.

.

We’ve all seen the same videos come out of Minneapolis this month, clearly showing non-threatening protestors killed by federal agents. The news is terrible. But in one way, it’s almost been like the good old days, when everybody read the same newspapers and watched the same three TV channels, agreed on what they’d seen, and then argued about it. More often these days, Americans start with arguments that arise from commentary or random social media posts.

The people who took those alarming videos with their cell phones often put themselves at risk, and all credit is due them. As my former newspaper colleague and media expert Kelly McBride writes, this moment will be defined by what we choose to record.

It’s important to remember what happens after the hot historical moments in which such recordings are made. To use the example of Alex Pretti’s death, it took cool-headed digital experts, editors and reporters to piece together videos, create verifiable story lines and add context.

First Amendment magic can happen when courageous citizens provide raw material to trained journalists. But what if the pros weren’t there? Increasingly, they aren’t. There’s been a 75% decline in journalists over the last 25 years. My great hope is that more Americans will subscribe and contribute to reputable media so that journalists are always, or once again, covering their communities.

Minneapolis is fortunate to have multiple media outlets. Foremost among them is the Minnesota Star Tribune, with a 200-person news staff. In a perfect example of observer/journalist teamwork, its photographer Richard Tsong-Taatarii relied on a network of volunteers—who stay in touch via Signal chat—to be in position to capture his famous image of a subdued protester being pepper-sprayed in the face.

Besides coordinating with journalists, volunteers can learn from them how to safely and effectively record history. They would do well to read Doug Pietch’s Tips on taking video from a journalist with 40+ years behind the lens. Among them: Pick a case that helps with your ability to grip the phone. Clean your lens before you start recording. Make sure you have a fully charged battery. The Poynter Institute’s 25 guidelines for journalists to safely cover unrest can help anyone recording at a protest or conflict. Not the least of those guidelines is maintaining situational awareness.

As a country, we’re in quite a situation. And we need everyone’s help to stay aware.

When I drive U.S. Highway 95 through North Central Idaho, I often stop near the top of White Bird Hill. A shelter there overlooks the battlefield where Nez Perce braves tangled with the U.S. Cavalry in 1877 before taking their epic flight toward Canada.

One time, a Montana family was there beside me, surveying the high-country panorama. Two grade-school boys were debating who kicked whose butt in the historic battle. Finally the younger one turned to his mom and asked, “Did we lose?”

An older man who was with them replied. He said: “Everybody loses in war.”

I’d bet that man was a veteran. I heard his same weary conviction in the voice of Ken Rodgers when he told me, “Nobody hates war more than a soldier.”

Ken served in Vietnam. He and his wife, Betty, created the “Bravo!” documentary about the siege of Khe Sanh, capturing the memories of Ken and the other Marines who survived those 77 hellish days. They have traveled widely to screen the film.

I know Ken and Betty because I went on a similar journey, giving readings from the Grady Myers memoir that I co-authored, “Boocoo Dinky Dow: My short, crazy Vietnam War.” The title comes from the way American soldiers pronounced beaucoup dien cai dau, a French-Vietnamese expression that meant very crazy. Off the wall.

Like Betty, I was the wife who decided those war memories should be preserved. Besides, as a journalist, I knew a good story when I saw one: A funny, artistic and nearsighted Boise teenager is transformed into Hoss, an M-60 machine gunner who nearly dies in battle.

I was the scribe for “Boocoo Dinky Dow.” Grady, a professional artist, provided illustrations. After he died in 2011, I published the book. It was satisfying to honor a talented man, the father of my son, by making his experiences part of the Vietnam War body of literature.

My life is richer thanks to the torrent of stories that have come back at me in return for sharing Grady’s.

I’ve heard stories from Marines, Navy and Army vets. But also from nurses and protesters and USO performers. From conscientious objectors and commanding officers. From pilots and submariners, professors and cops. From women who waited for brothers and sons to come home. From people forged by the war and people broken by it.

Even the stories I don’t hear intrigue me. At “Boocoo Dinky Dow” readings, I learned to watch for the guy at the back of the room, a guy in his 60s. He’d sit there, arms crossed, maybe nod a time or two. As others in the audience came up to chat, I would look over their shoulders and see him head out the door. Could he not bring himself to say hello and be asked what he did in the war? Had he suffered what journalist David Wood calls “moral injury”?

Maybe the silent man didn’t feel worthy of recognition. Or didn’t think he would get it. One combat vet told me, “I don’t want to be thanked for my service. I didn’t want to go. I was drafted.” Two sentences later, he explained how he worked hard not to resent Iraq and Afghanistan vets for having been welcomed home by the public.

How must it feel to have watched buddies die in a war that became a synonym for American failure?

I grapple myself with the increasing awareness that, in addition to horror and waste, war yields friendship, pride, and the occasional vanquishment of evil. War is a stage for both despicable crimes and crystalline acts of conscience. As Grady’s memoir and the “Bravo!” documentary show, war can inspire art.

When Ken told me that “nobody hates war more than a soldier,” he was responding to some angst I shared with him. I was fretting about the fine line that exists between honoring warriors and promoting wars. I didn’t want to step over that line. Frankly, I’m still not sure where it is.

But Ken is right. Most combat veterans fully understand the words that Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe said in surrender. That he was tired of fighting. That he would fight no more, forever.

Thanks to Bravo! the Project for permission to republish this essay.

You must read the book Everything is Tuberculosis, in which novelist John Green applies his storytelling skills to the true story of a disease.

TB has always killed more humans than any other illness, except for the two years when it was knocked off its miserable perch by Covid-19. Green became intrigued with the disease when he met one of its victims, a remarkable teenager in Sierra Leone. That young man’s fight for life is woven throughout Green’s expose of the world’s failure to eradicate a curable disease. Along the way, Green explains how TB is linked to everything from poverty to poetry to the design of cowboy hats.

Since he became aware that tuberculosis is still rampant, Green began to see its influence everywhere. Hence the book’s title, which mirrors my own reaction to an inflammatory condition of the nerves called adhesive arachnoiditis. Ever since I wrote about my probably not-so-rare-disease, I’ve connected arachnoiditis—hich causes chronic pain and is so far incurable—to many other subjects. Among them: disability aids, narcotics laws, travel restrictions, medical education, family dynamics and America’s health care system (I almost wrote “system.”)

I recently read about life-threatening placenta accreta, a formerly rare condition that can arise from repeated cesarean sections. I see in it parallels to arachnoiditis, which can result from back surgery and other repeated intrusions in the spinal column. It was a considered a sign of research progress in 2015 when placenta accreta was given its own diagnostic code. Arachnoiditis doesn’t have one; it is lumped in with other forms of meningitis.

Thanks to an article about the ways plants and animals can help human health, I learned about a species of predatory snail whose venom is used to make the drug ziconotide. Delivered via pump, it is one of the few non-opioid treatments for arachnoiditis patients suffering intense pain.

Out of Switzerland comes news of experimental robots the size of a grain of sand that could travel through the bloodstream and release medicine exactly where it’s needed. Might micro-robots one day be used to dissolve the scar tissue that adheres spinal nerves to the arachnoid layer?

That layer, also known as the arachnoid mater, is part of the sheath surrounding our cerebrospinal nerves. It gets its name from its spider-webbed appearance under a microscope. Perhaps it is fitting that adhesive arachnoiditis has so many connective threads linking it to science, culture and our collective humanity.

You can dream of a white Christmas all you want, but to my thinking the surest way to holiday happiness is having a little kid in the house. My son, Jake, was around kindergarten age when I asked his artist dad, Grady Myers, to create a greeting card. I wanted it to feature our boy who, IMHO, was the cutest child in Spokane, if not the state of Washington. It was the late 1980s.

I suggested the “Noel news is good news” line. It was perhaps not original, but was apt, as we both worked at the local newspaper. Ever guilty of puns, I also wrote the headline “Santa’s visit sleighs Jake.” Grady came up with the vintage paperboy outfit, the festive lettering and the true-to-life sparkling eyes. A quarter-century later, I saw the same gleam in the eyes of Jake’s daughter, Allie.

Grady and I collaborated on many projects. The biggest was his Vietnam War memoir, which includes his recollection of a Christmas feast served amidst front-line squalor. The guy had a knack for finding something funny in the darkest of moments. Holidays do the opposite. Hallmark scenes can be dive-bombed by sadness. Grady died at age 61, mere months after his granddaughter was born. I’m sure that first Christmas without their father was tough on Jake and his sister Megan.

Holding that yellowing, decades-old card this week reminded me of my fascinating and fun, if often frenzied and fraught, years as a journalist. The “Read all about it!” newsboy, himself a throwback to earlier media days, holds up a paper featuring two mastheads. One is The Spokesman-Review, the morning paper whose hyphenated name reflected a late-1800s merger. The other is the Spokane Chronicle, an afternoon paper that had been the S-R’s competitor for nearly a century but eventually shared a news staff. The Chronicle printed its last edition in 1992. As 2025 draws to a close, The Spokesman-Review is being donated to a non-profit that will, hopefully, find enough community support to survive and thrive.

Such are the generational changes of the news industry. Meanwhile, within my nine-sibling Titone clan, our latest great-nephew is ogling his first twinkling tree and our mom is celebrating her 101st Christmas. It’s been awhile since Mom made eggnog and served it up after Midnight Mass. That creamy sweetness tinged with brandy and rum was my first teen taste of hard liquor. I grew up to be a red-wine type of gal but, awash in nostalgia, I just may make some eggnog this week. It will be a lactose-free version, but, hey, all traditions are subject to change.

Happy everything, everybody.

Pain is the most common reason that people see a primary care doctor. If you have chronic pain—the kind that’s stuck around for three months or more—chances are you’ve seen lots of specialists, too. You may dread their standard question as much as I do: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much pain do you feel, with 10 being the worst pain possible?”

I hesitate to answer. If I say 6, will I feel like a whiner? If I say 5, will my pain be taken seriously? How would I know if I felt the worst possible pain? Are you asking how much does it hurt when I stand or when I sit?

There is value in trying to quantify pain, and many have tried to improve upon the 10-point scale. But pain can never be captured by numeric language or, for that matter, the English language. Good doctors are less interested in numbers than in how the pain is affecting someone’s life.

This subject is on my mind because of the responses to my post, My probably not-so-rare disease. Readers who share my diagnosis of adhesive arachnoiditis told me they appreciated my effort to spread the word about this chronic inflammatory disease. But a few chided me for downplaying how painful arachnoiditis can become. Here is what I wrote: “Patients experience lower body numbness and stinging pain that, at its worst, is likened to hot water dripping down the legs. The disease can lead to paralysis and bladder dysfunction.”

I debated which words to use in that fourth paragraph. A litany of misery might cause folks to stop reading, so I kept the descriptive list short. Now, in recognition of those who suffer, I will expand upon the kinds of pain reported by arachnoiditis patients.

Burning, stabbing, shocking, zapping, buzzing, icy hot, insects crawling under the skin. Deep aching/boring in the spine. Pain radiating down the back of the legs. Vice-like pressure. Cramping. Pain that increases upon standing or sitting. Sudden flares triggered by movement. Widespread burning in the lower body. Pelvic, abdominal and bladder-related pain. Unrelenting, throbbing, exhausting.

As one woman wrote in an online discussion: “How much can a body take?” Some patients answer with suicide.

What makes this all doubly sad is that arachnoiditis often begins when people seek relief, via injections or surgery, from another source of pain.

So far, my own arachnoiditis is not debilitating. I get modest relief from medicines, movement and massage. Distraction helps. If you need advice on the best ice packs and seat cushions, I’m your gal.

Chronic pain plagues an estimated 20 to 30 percent of people in the world at any given time. The cliché goes that misery loves company. I don’t love it, but that massive crowd of company could work in my favor. Researchers have 2 billion reasons to investigate pain treatment and prevention. As the secrets of neural pathways are unlocked, the knowledge is bound to benefit those of us with arachnoiditis.

My sister-in-law, a pro photographer, has a knack for tilting her camera in a way that strikes me as strange but makes wonderful portraits. I once asked Annie how she does that and she replied: “Cocktails.”

When I took this tilted window picture, I may have just spoken with Annie. She was in another part of our nephew’s Illinois farmhouse, scene of a family Thanksgiving feast. Ours is a big clan, so this was a three-turkey, groaning-dessert-table, bonfire-out-back affair. Inside was bright, and warm with bodies. Outside was snow-crunchy cold.

The late afternoon gloom was broken by a sliver of sunset. It may have been the orange hue in that fading light, repeated in the window frame, that captured my eye. Plus, the sight of a fallow field and flat horizon tugged at me. I’m a Midwesterner who transplanted to the Northwest long ago. When I was young, I couldn’t wait to explore places beyond the rows of corn and soybeans. Now a visit to the plains makes me nostalgic.

I’ll miss out on the Illinois feast this year. I’m counting on seeing some pictures, tilted and otherwise.

PS: This post has nothing to do with the reason I started writing on Substack, which was to spread the word about a painful disease called adhesive arachnoiditis. I’ll have more to say about that, but I’ve decided to intersperse the weighty posts with some brief takes on things that make life worth living.