In the golden hour before the dawn the black-capped chickadees talked amongst themselves, adding more and more high-pitched “dee-dee-dee’s” to their song the closer I walk to them. I’m the intruding loner early in the morning and this is their warning to each other. I may live here, but this isn’t my backyard—it’s always belonged…
“If there seems to be no communication between you and the people around you, try to draw close to those things that will not ever leave you. The nights are still there and the winds that roam through the trees and over many lands.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet We’re often…
Mid-March brought the turkeys back. They roost high in the white pine trees at the edge of the forest, protected from the coyotes, bobcats and other predators who long for a turkey dinner. They’re silent during the early morning hours until something disturbs them. This morning that something was me. Coffee in hand, I walked…
“On every side, the eye ranged over successive circles of towns, rising one above another, like the terraces of a vineyard, till they were lost in the horizon. Wachusett is, in fact, the observatory of the State. There lay Massachusetts, spread out before us in its length and breadth, like a map. There was the…
I watched a squirrel, fat for winter, dig in the garden for who knows what. The squirrel wasn’t welcome, but invited itself to this place I’ve called my own. Its ancestors might say the same of me, for one day generations ago there was a stand of trees, the next day someone laid a foundation…
We live in a world of scarcity and abundance. I see it in nature, where wildlife adjusts to a world of dwindling food, scrapping together something to eat in the dormant forest. A newly-filled birdfeeder sets off an alarm in the woods, and no sooner do I walk away from it that it’s filled with…
Waking up before first light to the sound of owls, you might find in the silence to follow that you have decisions to make.
If there’s a perk to travel, it’s the opportunity to encounter things you would never see in your daily existence. When you pause from your frenzied attempt at getting things done long enough to observe what’s hiding in plain sight around you. On this particular trip, it began with a glimpse of a duck swimming…
“If men had wings and bore black feathers, Few of them would be clever enough to be crows.” – Henry Ward Beecher I stood at the window and watched three crows walk across the lawn, pausing now and then to pluck some edible creature out of the grass. Each walked with intent, and the three…
It’s easy to see motion in the garden when the motion is coming from a six foot tall mess of stakes, chicken wire and plastic netting. The chicken wire was a 2021 addition after the plastic netting proved insufficient to keep the birds and chipmunks off of the blueberry bushes. Know what my blueberry harvest…
