I called three work friends yesterday to check in. I’m a bit old-school that way; I’d rather speak with someone than text with them. Two were doing well, one not so well with troubles at home and an uncertain job situation. All are surfing the same wave of 2020 crazy that the rest of us…
I lit a Sunday evening fire outside on the brick patio last night. This is two Sundays in a row, almost a trend. Last week was bear in the woods fireside Sunday. This week no such excitement, just the observation that the days are getting shorter and colder. If I were a bear I’d be…
“Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it…
As the leaves fall the big reveal begins. What exactly have the neighbors across the way been doing all summer with all that building and landscaping? We’ll know soon enough. The golden leaves of fall are quickly conceding to fate and weather, dropping in abundance to coat the ground in a blanket of yellows and…
For the first time since early in the pandemic I decided to take a walk on the Windham Rail Trail after work. I figured at dusk most people would be wrapping up their time on the trail and heading home. I figured wrong. I nodded a greeting to those who made eye contact, ignored those…
“Filling the mind with illusions is not the way to carry out with honor the work of exploration.” – Samuel Champlain Champlain was a stickler for careful preparation and research. He wasn’t one to half-ass anything he did, especially when it came to sailing across an ocean to uncharted places. He learned from the failures…
“You write. That’s the hard bit that nobody sees.” – Neil Gaiman “I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.” – Kurt Vonnegut Travel writing is easy by comparison. Experience a place or an event and then convey that bit of magic to others in…
Sunday night, while sitting around the fire in conversation, a large wild creature moved through the woods, announcing its presence with the crunch of dried leaves and crack of fallen twigs. Not a deer. Not a raccoon or a skunk. Definitely not a squirrel. I quietly walked into the house for the big flashlight and…
“Be humble for you are made of earth. Be noble for you are made of stars.” – Serbian proverb I sat outside last night on a cold evening in front of a warming fire; my body at the line of the radiating heat competing with the sneaky cold creeping up behind me. I inhaled more…
Normally this weekend in New Hampshire is peak foliage season. But a sustained drought has stressed the trees just enough to pull peak ahead by two weeks. So the thousands of people plugging up the roadways of the Mount Washington National Forest were seeing the forest muted in dynamic impact. And yet they came. And…