Nicola Pitchford
@NJPitchford
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Immigrant. Winner of the inaugural Nature Chronicles Prize (2022). She/her. Also
N. California (on Miwok land)
Joined July 2016
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Much in shock but not so much that I can't show off. Just thrilled to have been awarded the
@NaturePrize
and immensely grateful to the funders & judges. I have to say, the other winning essays sound amazing & I can't wait to read them.
Huge congratulations to inaugural winner
@NJPitchford
. So great see these brilliant writers on zoom and in the room this evening at
@KendalBookFest
.
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I have just been watching The Happiest Crow in the World in the car park behind the supermarket. It scored an intact bag of tortilla chips that must have blown off a palette, pierced it, & has spent the last 5 minutes grabbing one luridly orange chip at a time, prancing …
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A lifelong friend of my mother’s used to send her a calendar of the Lake District every year, even after they had not seen each other for decades. When that friend became ill with dementia, her husband (living now full-time in Grasmere) kept up the tradition. 1/🧵
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… triumphantly over to a safe spot in the flower bed (concealed), where I assume it gobbles it away, then gradually sidling crabwise back across the loading area, head tilting in all directions, for another. Its mannerisms are utterly charming & it is simply bursting with glee.
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So I’m back at work & it’s up in my office, encouraging daydreams. And exuding kindness.
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4/ And thus we’ve had a gentle little occasional correspondence this year, my elderly friend in Grasmere & I. He’s going to visit
@pollyrowena
&
@likewinterblue
at the bookshop in the village, because I wrote about them. And at Christmas, he sent me this beauty.
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@NorthenResister
@DeaconBlues0
More recently, God let him be fined $156k for peddling fake COVID cures.
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2/ She died, & her husband still sent a calendar every year from Grasmere to my mum in the US. I wrote to him when Mum died, & received the most gracious & kind letter back. He knew Mum’s whole family & had stayed close with them for many years, after she moved away.
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(Aside: when my parents first separated & my dad was very unwell with grief, these friends of Mum’s lent us their Grasmere house for a week, somewhere “away” where Dad could take us, along with his mother for support, & start to recover. So I’ve actually stayed where he lives.)
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3/ I told him Mum had always hung his calendars by the breakfast table. I wrote about the Lake District & how important it had been to us, how it was in some ways my & my mum’s shared paradise. How she & I had blissful walking holidays there after she retired, just the two of us.
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@scgQuasar
@MeredithAlberta
My Scottish great-grandmother too. "I'll away ta me bed now and let you get home."
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@SophieHaigney
@darth
Here in solidarity with everyone who's been told (with a very strained smile), "We just think it might be nicer for everyone if [your dog] didn't come back."
(RIP hellboi)
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@WSJopinion
You weren't targeted for being provocative. You were targeted for being rude, dismissive, condescending, hypocritical, & lacking in either nuance or substance. That's not cancel culture; it's a failure of quality control.
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I had the strangest & most vivid grief moment just now, 14 months on from my mother’s death. I made myself an afternoon snack with her favourite cheese, sat down in her favourite chair to read (as I do most days) & suddenly she was viscerally, almost physically with me. (1/2)
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OMG look who graced my office with a visit: it's Lee, service pupper in training 💕
@darth
@dog_rates
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@bvbillionaire
Cracks me up that he's in the kitchen and you're not. Our dog gate was there to keep Rupert OUT of the kitchen.
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@JuanSaaa
As a "legal" immigrant who deserves that status no more than you do, I send solidarity & empathy & a commitment to
#DefendDACA
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I lost her the first time when I was 10 — in romantic love & despair, she walked out one day on marriage, children, her life as it was. Regained her as a deep, beautiful friend in adulthood. Nursed her, finally. What a rich weave it all was.
I carried this photo for years.
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Today may not be the best day ever, but look at these tiny fungi in my wet garden (blade of grass for scale). Wonders persist.
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@CarlLPalmer
@katebcarp
Same. It's also come out as "Beast," which probably is indeed a bit hostile.
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There is, in fact, some small good continuing to accrue in the world.
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@joshgerstein
@ImmCivilRights
This is horrifying. One judge has the power to destroy 300,000 lives and more?
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I haven’t experienced anything like that sudden, profoundly physical feeling of presence before—not even in the first days when I’d enter her room and almost fully expect to see her in the bed. A real haunting. Grief is truly mysterious. (2/2)
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I actually wish this timeline synchronicity thing would happen less often,
@EffinBirds
. I'm sorry you have to be the Oracle of Our Age.
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Deep frost, deep peace at the reservoir this morning.
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@polly
@MikeIsaac
Just wait for your 50s. I have to work out before I can even give someone a hard stare.
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Puck came to our office today! They say Puck is a service pupper, but we all just want to serve him.
@darth
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@MaureenLangloss
I (and/or my dog) found a number of strange food items on the streets of NYC. A stick of butter. A bunch of bananas. An unopened 2-lb package of ground beef.
(We didn't eat the beef. I don't think the dog ever forgave me. But he got revenge by smearing the butter all over me.)
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Happy 75th anniversary to a splendid & wonderful film. (My favourite moment is when Niven’s character, thinking himself dead, meets a friendly Labrador & says “I always hoped there would be dogs.”)
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@Esqueer_
This is really horrifying. We know how cynical this man is, but this is such a direct incitement to violence. It really is another step toward fascism.
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Days like this come every November. That doesn’t make them any less astonishing. Geese overhead, mist shining.
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@darth
@rAdelaidegrl
I don't like to show off
@darth
(yes I do) but WE MET FRED IN ADELAIDE not long ago and it was one of the best days of my life.
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@PhillipLawler1
What a lucky squirrel! When I worked in a 5th-floor office in the Bronx I once came back in after leaving my window open, to see a squirrel escaping with the entire apple I had left on the desk. How it stretched its jaws that wide is beyond me. My sandwich was also missing.
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It's a failure of imagination for institutions to respond to credible accusations by imagining only what might be lost by taking action against the abuser. Let's try envisioning everything that has already been lost, and will never come to be, because of an environment of abuse.
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@tracysefl
@soniasaraiya
One tragic, infuriating, 100% avoidable part of a tragic, enraging, 100% avoidable story.
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@evopsychgoogle
I see it’s been a busy day for
@infinite_scream
but I’m sorry we need overtime
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@CA_AstroComm
Hello sister-doctors all. PhD in literature with a side of women's studies. Have gone on to do fascinating non-teaching things also. Not currently being menaced by a giant terrier.
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In all the times I’ve run or hiked here, I never noticed until now that this rock looks like a giant petrified lizard climbing up from the hollow below.
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I am just going to be grossly sentimental and decide it’s my mummy, welcoming me home to the house where she was deeply loved for her last few months, & making sure I know I’m loved on Christmas Eve. From the window of ‘her’ room…
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Today is my dear mummy’s birthday—she would have been 86—& I have woken up weepy. Remembering the unfamiliar privilege of making a very flat & comical Victoria sponge cake for her last year.
Here we are on a California hill about ten years ago. So much feels broken since. x
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Since my mum’s death I’ve been focusing, tbh, on everything broken & diminished in her life & between us. Less grieving than angry & so disappointed. But today, right now, I’m happy & grateful that for decades I would have rushed to share something like this with no one but her.
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@LailaLalami
"David Coleman, the head of the College Board, said in an interview that the changes were all made for pedagogical reasons, not to bow to political pressure." Um. So they had no idea about pedagogy when they floated the first draft?
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I ran 37km today through gorgeous landscapes & while my shoes (& socks) are now so vile they may never regain access to the house, I’m pleased to say I spent zero minutes wishing I were dead (or fearing that imminent circumstance).
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This beautiful piece by
@RobGMacfarlane
makes my heart ache. I read it while sitting under trees.
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Okay, I couldn’t resist. I was raised with the Romantic aesthetic.
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@AnneLouiseAvery
I was so delighted with the story
@AnneLouiseAvery
made for me that I showed everyone I work with. Yesterday one of my colleagues gave me this bag, on which she had printed it so I can carry it with me everywhere. I got completely choked up. (Hope you don’t mind, Anne Louise.)
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@OwenJones84
One of the best statements from a cis woman I’ve heard. “In my experience, most men who want to abuse women don’t feel the need to change their gender in order to do it. And abusive men are what we should be focused on.”
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How can I possibly be expected to get properly dressed & go to the office after this…
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All this, & the cry of geese directly to the north. So much gratitude, & also so much terror at the thought of ever losing this. Consciously trying just to be here now.
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Well bless me, last Sunday was my first mountain lion sighting & this morning I saw a bald eagle (!!) along Lagunitas Creek, being shouted at by a large crow. Bald eagles are not long reestablished in this area.
Apologies for crap iPhone photo, but I had to record the moment.
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So I just told 2 complete strangers as I passed that I sometimes lay my head against this tree & weep. But since they were sitting high in its branches, legs swinging, I took a chance they’d understand. We all agreed that this is The Best Tree.
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I think it may be my life’s question (or at least that of a next book) to understand how you can be in a place you love ever more deeply, while also sick with longing for the other place that was your home.
Not the world’s worst problem. But perhaps increasingly common.
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@shannonrwatts
May I just encourage everyone to donate to
@NAPW
, which has been fighting these cases over & over. Eventually they succeed, again & again. Yet it keeps happening, and scientific evidence be damned (& most people still believe "crack babies" were a real thing).
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For my first 11 winters here, I neither saw nor knew how to look for salmon in the creek. Now I’ve watched them three times in recent weeks. It’s so gratifying that your experience of a place can keep getting richer & deeper. (Plus the salmon are actually returning.)
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I think I’m being taught a gentle lesson about being in the here & now. Bring on the gentle lessons.
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There is a disturbingly solid bull waiting for me at the top of the next rise.
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Me: Look, I made foraged nettle & leek soup!
OH: Will you be driving yourself to the hospital or will you require assistance?
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I got this Christmas cactus for my mother’s bedside. It began blooming on Xmas Eve, covered in tiny buds. I neglected it terribly during the next awful 19 days of her dying; the buds remained, dried up & tight. Now they’re opening into blooms, for Easter. It feels… meaningful.
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Congratulations to Austin Killips 🏆🏳️⚧️
Race photo by thatsneate IG
Women’s GC results after Stage 5 of
#TOTG2023
:
🥇Austin Killips
@AmyD_Foundation
🥈
@marce_prieto92
@patobike030773
🥉 Emily Ehrlich
@TeamTWENTY24
🔴Climber’s jersey: Killips
@AmyD_Foundation
💚Sprinter’s jersey:
@ShaynaPowless
@DNA_K4
⚪️Best Young Rider jersey: Nadia
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WE HAVE BEES and my day has improved markedly. What astonishing little creatures.
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30 years today since my sweet father died. He was 30 when I was born, so in a few weeks I'll have lived longer than he did. After nursing my mother through her last childhood, I will become my father's elder.
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Ultrarunner Camille Heron
@runcamille
has just run 435.2km in 48 hours, setting a new world record.
I find this absolutely extraordinary. As if a human had mastered unassisted flight, or dancing on the head of a pin.
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@Cristian_S_Tx
@samswey
@RAICESTEXAS
@RAICESTEXAS
As a repeat donor, I am extremely concerned by this. Will not be donating further until the workers' and Union's concerns about the process and individual appointed have been publicly & substantively addressed.
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Bobcat. Possibly the closest I’ve been, as it paused still on the trail to first observe me — although by the time I got the camera on, it had begun to depart.
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I made a mess of
#12DaysOfChristmas
tweets, mixing up 9&10 then giving up. But on the 13th Day of Christmas, my True Love gave to me…himself. For keeps. So many years ago!—yet at the time I felt I had a well-established adult life, to be happily solo forever. Wonders never cease
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A small lifelong ritual that connects me to my mum & her gentle, garden-loving father: Grandpa taught each of us how to release poppies (when ready) from their little paper hats. I always say hello to him when I do it.
For
#SmallBeautiesHour
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@KathrynCock
@adamkanzen
@JaneyGodley
Now if they'd just start making those for Mother's Day too....
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Not a big fan of selfies, but I have to thank
@karincelestine
for the inspiration and courage to try knitting my very first sweater. Wool & pattern from the rather lovely
@thewoollythistl
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Have confirmed (by looking it up) that I saw a pileated woodpecker in the coastal redwoods yesterday. Never seen one here before — that must be right at the edge of their continental habitat. They’re huge! Twice the size of our acorn woodpeckers.
(Photo from wikimedia cc)
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I remember coming up here a year ago, a quick stolen break from tending Mum in her last weeks. Feeling how profoundly I needed it, how at-the-verge I’d been. I hope all the caregivers out there have some way of feeling seen, getting a breather, however brief, refuelling.
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I had an exceptionally good day at work on Thursday. Not my usual responsibilities.
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My very brief essay for the series, Letter to My California Dreamer. On deserts, immigrants, & my dad.
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Coyote traversing the green spring hillside. I told it, with I hope the appropriate respect, that it was a good doggy.
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@FaithfullyBP
This man has amassed enough wealth to have a transformative impact on global poverty; yet he chooses not only to continue seeking new ways to increase it but to increase generational poverty & inequity in doing so.
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@DrSelvarajah
Yep, a couple of child migrants here too. A company VP and a university leader. Funny how no one called my family "economic migrants."
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Possibly my best
#bobcat
sighting yet. How amazing to be sharing the hills with these creatures.
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I am pretty certain I just saw, for the first time in my life, a mountain lion (in the wild). For all the thousands of hours I’ve spent out on these hills, I’ve always hoped to see one. It was distant, but the heaviness of its movement was nothing I had seen before. SO exciting.
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@tressiemcphd
So much this! It's astonishing. Not to mention doctors' offices where you can only ever leave a message for a call-back. As if I could answer the phone at any damn time during business hours?
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Hankies at the ready.
Having been apart from my mum for most of my childhood & adult life, this is the first time I’ve ever had the opportunity to make her a birthday cake (85). It’s flat & it’s wonky and she may or may not be well enough to eat any, but we’re together. ❤️
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