Funeral for a Sparrow, Chicken Eggs, Clay Bird

A friend found a dead sparrow and brought it to us for our home school. It resided in our freezer for a couple of weeks until today we remembered it. We unwrapped it and studied it for a bit, which wasn’t easy as it was frozen stiff. Then Amie suggested a funeral. We brought it …

Sun Motions

This is a cool tool. Put yourself on the north pole, or at, say, 74.8 degrees N latitude. Is this nature study? I’ve rediscovered Tim Morton’s books on ecology, among them Ecology without Nature and The Ecological Thought, where he introduces the concept of dark ecology as a means of expressing the “irony, ugliness, and …

Chicken in Brown Paper Bag

Our plans to bury the recently deceased Nocty were thwarted by the deep freeze we are in. The ground is rock hard. The bird too. I put Nocty in an empty feed bag and rolled it up. I’m keeping her on the porch so no big animals can get at her. As for the little ones, …

Of Flowers

I’m sitting at my desk, drinking hot tea of .         chamomile, .     peppermint, .   licorice, and honey. There’s a book open, in the pool of lamp light. It’s William Carlos Williams’s Collected Poems, at “Asphodel.” Reading it is like descending, step by step, into a deep sorrow, from .   root, …

Two Month’s Worth of Trash and Terrible Faux-Pas!

This is (four days shy of)  two month’s worth of trash: one 30 gallon bag (our town uses PAYT – Pay As You Throw – and these bags cost $2 each, which is still way too little if you ask me) and an assortment of recyclables.  I didn’t weigh all this before taking it to …

Perspective from the Creatures of the Soil

A Fugue. I’m reading the newly arrived Life in the Soil. Actually, I’m devouring it. And it’s not even that particularly well or passionately written. I started wondering about this as I marveled over acellular slime molds and trichomycetes and realized that I often take refuge in books about soil and geology when I am down …

Exploring Pain: Amie’s Variation of the Wildcraft Board Game

Last week I splurged on Wildcraft, a cooperative board game for kids (and adults) developed by HerbMentor, one of my favorite places for herbal instruction. The idea of the game is to make it up the mountain to the huckleberry patch, gather huckleberries, and make it back down again to grandma’s house before nightfall. And not …