Issue 465 | The Sun Magazine

September 2014

Readers Write

The Refrigerator

A mustard-colored declaration of love, holy pink boxes of leftover delicacies, long-necked brown beer bottles

By Our Readers
The Dog-Eared Page

Bodies Of The Giants

I stayed two days close to the bodies of the giants, and there were no trippers, no chattering troupes with cameras. There’s a cathedral hush here. Perhaps the thick soft bark absorbs sound and creates a silence. The trees rise straight up to zenith; there is no horizon.

By John Steinbeck
Quotations

Sunbeams

The oaks and the pines, and their brethren of the wood, have seen so many suns rise and set, so many seasons come and go, and so many generations pass into silence, that we may well wonder what the ‘story of the trees’ would be to us if they had tongues to tell it, or we ears fine enough to understand.

Charles R. Skinner

The Sun Interview

Call Of The Wild

Bernie Krause On The Disappearing Music Of The Natural World

Nearly 50 percent of the habitats where I’ve made recordings over the past forty-plus years have been so severely damaged that they’re now either biophonically silent or altered to the point of being unrecognizable.

By Leath Tonino
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Beyond Belief

The first instruction was “Find a quiet place.” I went to Inwood Park and seated myself on a large rock, legs crossed, eyes closed. Immediately an airplane flew overhead. I stood up, walked a hundred yards deeper into the park, sat beside a tree, and again closed my eyes. This time I heard traffic from the Henry Hudson Parkway. Over and over I sat down, each time encountering a new distraction. Defeated, I walked home.

By Sparrow
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Tornado Season

I’m scared now because so little of the Darren I’ve always known seems to remain in his weakened body. I can’t remember ever having been more frightened by a change in someone. I understand that we should expect “personality inconsistencies,” as the emergency-room doctor said, but it’s as if an entirely new brother came home with us from the Wabash County Hospital.

By Doug Crandell
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Winter Garden

The winter garden is a good place to incubate the idea of a child. It is all potential, like an empty house waiting to be furnished. Just as I imagined the chickens laying, the now-dormant bulbs blossoming, and the grapes ripening in the sun, so too I dreamed of buying maternity clothes and onesies, feeling euphoric after giving birth, and feeding an infant from my own body. Even the prospect of sleepless nights with a crying baby seemed enticing.

By Hanna Neuschwander
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Prayer For Gluten

Heavenly Father, in your infinite goodness you created the earth and blessed us with its clear, abundant waters and fertile lands yielding plenteous harvests of fruits and vegetables and grains, some of which happen to contain gluten. We praise you, Lord, for creating gluten, an important yet humble source of protein enjoyed for centuries by the peoples of many nations, the great majority of whom didn’t even know it existed until recently.

By Wendy Brenner
Fiction

The Life She’s Been Missing

She does not yet know the thirty-six-year-old Addie who will become managing editor of Nylon magazine, the forty-four-year-old first-time novelist, the sixty-two-year-old breast-cancer survivor.

By Greg Ames
Photography

What We Eat

In 2006 my husband, photojournalist Peter Menzel, and I produced a book detailing the food that thirty families in twenty-four different countries consumed in one week’s time. . . . We traveled the world again, this time photographing scores of different people from disparate backgrounds, each with one typical day’s worth of food. The result is What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets.

By Faith D’Aluisio & Peter Menzel
Poetry

The Empty Dress

March sky the color of smoke; / Carla’s red hair blazed, a torch song of hopeless hope / as she powered her wheelchair through the Vintage Fair / to help me find a wedding dress.

By Alison Luterman