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Spring
So. I have been thinking about the change of seasons. I don’t want to miss spring this year. I want to distinguish the last winter frost from the out-of-season one, the frost of…
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Storm writing
Even in the Northeast, everyone is bracing for Hurricane Sandy. Back on Wednesday, before it had really registered as a force to be reckoned with, I read this episode in The Child from…
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My Side of the Mountain
The girls and I finished our reading of My Side of the Mountain yesterday. It left me pondering the stark contrasts between 2012 and 1959, when Jean Craighead George’s Newberry winning classic was…
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Feather, Light, and Air
Did you know there’s a whole volume of chickadee poems? I’m apparently one of many fans of this cheerful, talkative, hardy, round little acrobat. Anna Botsford Comstock points out that the winter birds…
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A Wing in the Door
A Wing in the Door by Peri Phillips McQuay is by turns a beautiful and a frustrating book. It narrates the fate of a female red-tailed hawk taken illegally by a would-be falconer…
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Rufous Redtail
I read this book when I was around 10, and I’ve always remembered it as one of the best. I didn’t remember all the details, but I remembered some of them. Mostly I…
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Becoming Native to This Place
I was introduced to Wes Jackson’s work through reading Wendell Berry. The two men have a longstanding friendship and have similar views of what Berry has called “culture and agriculture.” In Becoming Native…
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Exhaustless entertainment
The fields and woods about one are a book from which he may draw exhaustless entertainment, if he will. (John Burroughs, from the essay “A Sharp Lookout”) Today, the girls and I took…
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Longlegs the Heron
We’ve been reading and enjoying Thornton Burgess’s Longlegs the Heron. A friend loaned us a copy of this difficult-to-find book after reading this post, and as food for our ongoing heron interest it…
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The Wild Trees
“I think I’ve found out the secret of making a dream come true.” “What’s that?” “Just don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop. If someone tells you something is impossible, do that thing…
