Cold nights; warm days. The forest is speaking to us in sugar. Long ago, during a late winter ski week in New Hampshire, my father took me down the road to visit Mr. Lucy’s sugarhouse. At one time, the Lucy family had owned and farmed much of the Saco River valley land on the west … Continue reading
Category Archives: The Natural World
The Black Velvet Hole in the Woods
The Black Velvet Hole in the Woods This year, the bear just left his footprint in the mud as he walked away from our bird feeder. Last year he took the feeder. Sunflower seeds seem like such a poor early spring meal for as big an animal as a black bear, especially since it … Continue reading
The Annual Rings of Christmas
The first flakes of a Nor’easter were already falling as my daughter Ariel and I tiptoed across the frozen stream and walked up the hill into our fir stand. She had already scouted out a suitable tree to cut, if we could find that tree for the forest. We had to hurry. The chickadees were … Continue reading
Having a Cabin in Mind
I have a cabin in mind. It’s something I’ve been yearning to build for a while now, say forty years, but haven’t gotten around to. It derives from the aspiration for a dedicated space, four walls and a roof devoted to one man and rumination; a space on which nothing intrudes. It is also the … Continue reading
Between summer and fall, time to pause
John Keats never climbed Maine’s Mount Wallamatogus, the rusty mound of scuffed granite that slopes down to the Northern Bay of the Bagaduce. But had he been with Lesley and me yesterday, it definitely would have inspired an ode to autumn. Surely we were wandering in the romantic poet’s “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” … Continue reading
