after our long autumn, winter has finally set about us with its icy knives. even with daytime temperatures in the teens and twenties (fahrenheit), a breath of wind will tug the "feels like" temperature down below zero. the arctic air along with the foot of snow that we got early last week encourages indoor living, … Continue reading zero
stones
my neighbor recently paid someone to come in and cut down some venerable sugar maples and pull up a short stretch of century-old stone wall that ran along her property between her lawn and the road. there's a bleak scar now where the wall used to be and no sign of why someone would do … Continue reading stones
eyeshine
for some reason , fall is the time when deer are most active on my property. i like to think they're smart enough to know that i'm a bleeding-heart sapsucker with quiet woods and zero tolerance for projectile weapons around my livestock, but it's probably less intellectual than that. they're probably just moving from the … Continue reading eyeshine
slight
passion comes in tiny bursts in december. in the dark and cold, i can only muster excitement in small, discrete units. fourteen years ago, we moved into our house in october while the ground was thinking about freezing. any garden stuffs we moved from the old house to the new house were chucked into the … Continue reading slight
origin
pale horses moving through trees, dappled with darkness, the ghosts of a blizzard, their hoofbeats an echo of glaciers scraping at the roots of the earth. unseen traces drag winter behind them like a great roaring, billowing wagon: ice-laden, frost-swollen, lead-grey as november clouds.
urban
in which this (very briefly) becomes a travel blog. it surprises literally no one to learn that i am not at home in a city. i've lived most of my life in the country. not in a small, rural town, but out in the sticks, in the back of beyond, where self-sufficiency is key. there … Continue reading urban
perennial
i think i considered myself a gardener long before i did much gardening. my mother has always put in nice flower and kitchen gardens and told me stories about the gardens of her childhood, tended by her parents. some of my relatives are master gardeners (it's a thing), so i guess it's just part of … Continue reading perennial
phoebes
i heard a report on the radio recently that populations of flycatchers are down in the northeast US. i was a little alarmed, but i felt good that we've had a very successful nesting pair of phoebes for several years here on the mountain. one year they made a nest on an outcrop on the … Continue reading phoebes
scurf
horse ownership is a benign masochism. horses are large, dangerous, dirty beasts with a bite force that rivals many large carnivores and a kick that can easily break bones. they are prone to all kinds of bizarre ailments with charmingly medieval names (fistulous withers? girth gall? founder? strangles? rain rot?) and are alarmingly fragile for … Continue reading scurf
sprung
our early spring dragged on for months with brief intervals of winter. now it is mid-april and suddenly, real spring is upon us. the early robins, which were coming to the bird feeders and glumly eating seed from the ground (something i've never seen them do), have moved off to the meadows and forest to … Continue reading sprung
the gumboot gumshoe 