Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
Here’s one of the reviews I wrote for Suite101.com. The copyright recently passed to me, so I can share it with you here. It’s of Home Ground, a book that deals with the concept that is most on my mind these days: place. The more I think about place, the more it amazes me that …
Continue reading “Place: A Review of Home Ground, edited by Barry Lopes”
The temperatures have soared (in the low 50s today) and all the snow is melting. Funny, how all the stuff that fell on the snow but was covered up again is now showing on top: dust, twigs and leaves, tiny seeds… whatever snow is left now is no longer purely white. But last week, before …
Amie wanted to draw from one of our art books. It’s a new thing. She loves to sit with the “humongous fat one” that DH and I lugged all the way from the Louvre so many years ago, and leaf through all of its 600 pages. This time I pulled out a book about Hildegarde …
: peaked egg white snow : : closer up : : pocked snow (and Amie’s boot print) : : waves of snow : : closer up : : packed snow : : drifted snow : : crusts of snow :
I decided to combine this week’s Outdoor Hour and Winter Wednesday challenges. For the first we observe a tree throughout the seasons. Those who have followed the challenges from the beginning have done this three times already and will be completing the year. But as Amie and I have just joined the Outdoor Hour, this …
Continue reading “Winter Wednesday/Outdoor Hour: Beech Bark in Winter”
Amie and I spotted the first Robins of the year on 21 January. One of them was climbing the cranberry bushes underneath our feeders and kept falling off. He looked clumsy, groggy. Our neighbor – who can tell us which bird settled in our gardens in which year, going decades back – told us that …
To follow up on yesterday’s Outdoor Hour Challenge on Squirrels, here are some of today’s nature pictures. Squirrels, of course. Even though I dug out the snow around the bird feeder, they are still attempting to get up onto the baffle. The prickly bush approach must have been too painful, and it wasn’t working anyway: …
Continue reading “More Squirrel Shenanigans – and the OWLS!”
This challenge is really called “Tree Silhouettes,” but as the trees on our property and in our neighborhood are so crowded together, most of them haven’t grown into the typical shapes they would have had, had they been in an open space where they didn’t have to vie for sunlight with others. Except for the …
I think of the seeds every day. They’re locked away in their envelopes, in Ziploc bags, in a large cookie tin, in the cold basement. Held within these many layers, deprived of light, water and warmth and temperature fluctuations, they are kept suspended. I am rereading Thoreau’s Dispersion of Seeds. It was published for the …
It’s 8 in the morning and everyone is asleep but me. I’m in bed, next to the sleeping bodies, trying to type quietly. They lie so deep, while I’m on the surface, eyes wide open. I’m looking out of the bedroom window at the trees in our western garden and in the neighbors’ garden: beeches, …