(Concentration) Amie has taken a fancy to the glue. She has “glued” before: we put glue all over a sheet of paper and she stuck bits of paper and other things to it. But this time she wanted to glue. This meant first tearing up a page out of a magazine. We were both of us, I think, …
Author Archives: kaat
Wendell Berry is my hero
Thanks to Moonmeadow Farm, this is Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from his book The Country of Marriage (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). I hope it’s ok to reproduce it here… Oh but be fearless!  So: Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry (my hero) Love the quick profit, the annual …
The Drawing Book for and with Amie
Watching this video of Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on education and creativity at TED – hilarious, insightful, engaging and (ringing) so true – and reacquainting myself with Danny Gregory’s website and books on drawing, I realized there was a gap in my approach to art and creativity with Amie. When she draws or paints and asks …
Home Ground, edited by Barry Lopez
A while ago I was given a review copy of Home Ground, Language for an American Landscape. Barry Lopez, the editor, set 45 writers to writing over 850 new definitions for the terms Americans use to describe their land. What a book! It has revived my love-affair – lately somewhat neglected -with America and American nature writers, …
Itsy Bitsy Spider
Amie had a blast as a spider yelling “trick or treat” and “boo!”. She insisted that the day was called “Halloween Party”, not plain “Halloween”. I managed to keep her exposure to candy to a minimum, and she still thinks it means just chocolate. Someone offered her a lollipop and she looked at it with …
Happy Halloween
Happy Halloween! Depending on whether we make it to the party at Amie’s daycare tonight, there will be more pictures tomorrow. In the meantime, a bonus:
Amie’s Map Book
The second project I started right after Amie was born fared better than her now defunct Baby Journal, in that it is still up and running. It is a Map Book, or Place Book. I love maps: topographical ones, city, architectural, personal, subjective, objective, three-dimensional, temporal…Â you name it. From the beginning of Amie’s life I …
Children’s Books about Thoreau
 Not content with an article on D.B. Johnson’s wonderful Henry series, I published another article today, on Suite101.com, about five more children’s books about Henry David Thoreau: The Trouble with Henry, written by Deborah O’Neal and Angela Westengard and illustrated by S.D. Schindler (Candlewick Press, 2005). Henry David’s House, words by Thoreau (gleaned from …
Finally Fall
From this: To this: In just a week! I’ve already said it a couple of times: it’s Fall. Then I had to swallow my words when the next day it was steaming hot. Here, in Boston, near the end of October! But now I think I can with (weatherish) certainty say that it is, this time, now, …
Finding Time
 (Amie in the sandbox) Orion magazine made one of my favorite article by Rebecca Solnit, called “Finding Time,” available online. Read it here. In the meantime I’m still ill. But last weekend with our friends was wonderful, and this weekend we have a visit from Amie’s godmother. And next weekend, our old roommate is coming to stay with …