May 08, 2013 / The Farmer’s Land
Once upon a time there was a young farmer. He owned a large farm of many acres, and although he had to work very hard, he loved his land and loved caring for it. He knew every little hillock and valley of his farm, and every plant that grew on it, and all the animals that lived there, too. As… Read More
May 06, 2013 / It’s A Boy!
The volunteer tree on my deck is a male! He just flowered for the first time! So now he’s a grownup tree! He’s the tree I wrote about a couple of months ago, the Ash-Leaved Maple, sometimes called a Box Elder, which set up housekeeping in a pot on my deck about five years ago. You… Read More
April 29, 2013 / “The Danger of a Single Story”
Not my thought, but that of the Nigerian writer of extraordinary books who is named Chimamanda Adichie. In a TED talk (which you can view on YouTube), she warns us about this danger. She grew up, in Nigeria, in a household with professional parents and lots of books. They drove cars, and had… Read More
April 22, 2013 / Report: A Grievous Marathon Week
Monday It always begins with the reenactment, in the early light of dawn, of the first chaotic, confusing shots of the American Revolution, on the Green at Lexington. In the 4:30 am dark, spectators gather around its perimeter, well-bundled up against the cold, and drink coffee and eat donuts… Read More
April 15, 2013 / What Can You Learn From Travel? - 2 - Nature’s Ways
Those of the living natural world—plants and animals--(as opposed to the non-living, such as rocks) must solve the same problems as humans: getting nourishment and water, protecting against threats, reproducing. One excitement of seeing many landscapes, many different faunae and florae, is… Read More
April 08, 2013 / Low-Speed Squirrel Chases
I have been trying to take a picture of this for about two weeks now, for this blog post. But my squirrels are not cooperating: every time I see a couple of them engaged in this activity, the camera is elsewhere. Pairs of squirrels run slowly along the top of the fence at the back of my yard, or… Read More
April 08, 2013 / What Can You Learn From Travel? - 1 - Humans’ Ways
It seems that there is a finite number of ways which humans can devise to solve the ancient problems of needing food and water, shelter and protection, and making the next generation. And the more you travel, the oftener you may find yourself saying, with some chagrin, Oh, these folks are doing… Read More
April 08, 2013 / The Peculiar Torment of Travel
What a strange word to use: “torment.” Very many years ago, PBS presented a series called River Journeys, in which various somewhat well-known people made trips along very well-known rivers, and reported on their experiences. These were not sanitized trips, at least the parts shown… Read More
April 01, 2013 / What Can You Do With A Dump?
When we first moved here, it was a dump. No, I mean a real dump, a mountain of trash and garbage. Opportunistic gulls lunched on it. They wheeled above it in large numbers, their loud calls vaguely cat-like. For twenty years the city I live in had used this site as a dump. In some ways it was a… Read More
March 29, 2013 / Walking the Labyrinth
I’m not much of a Christian at all, but it is Holy Week, that fraught week between Palm Sunday and Easter, and there are various marvels encoded in churchly behavior to be considered once again. Palm fronds from hot places are brought into cold churches and waved about. At another time… Read More