Big Leaves
Sri Lanka is a tear-drop-shaped island at the tip of India. Not far from the equator. The noon sun is incredibly powerful, as I discovered after failing to completely cover my winter-white skin with sunblock. There’s green everywhere–every inch that isn’t covered by pavement has tropical foliage bursting out of it. All those leaves soaking in the sunshine. Tall, elegant palms. Banana trees with leaves as long as a basketball player. Papaya trees that look exactly like the truffula trees in The Lorax, with football size papayas growing at their tops. Flowers everywhere,...
Read MoreOn the Road
Thanks once again to Wells Horton for another lovely photograph. http://wells-horton.smugmug.com/ “The Road,” as Bilbo Baggins often remarked, “goes on and on, down from the door where it began.” In the words of J.R. R. Tolkien: “He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’ he used to say. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet,...
Read MoreThin-leaved Coneflower: What’s in a Name?
A cold and dreary winter field. In summer it’s a green and golden wildflower meadow. In winter it’s brown stalks. Peeking out from under this abandoned piece of haying equipment (I think it’s a baler?) is a not-very-well-known wildflower. In summer it looks a lot like a daisy, but with golden-yellow rays surrounding a dark “eye” center. Nope, not a Black-eyed Susan. This is one of Susan’s cousins, though, in the Rudbeckia family. Three-Lobed Coneflower, or Thin-Leaved Coneflower, or Three-Leaved Coneflower, depending on which field guide you use....
Read MoreFrost on the Sky
The sky in February. Can’t seem to make up its mind. Clouds racing along, shoved by the sub-zero winds high above us. Is it clearing? Clouding up? Blizzard? Flurry? Even the Weather Channel doesn’t know. One minute, spring coming. The next minute, lots of winter left. Some days the sky is as gray as a wall of cement. Other days, as blue as a June noon. Ouch. When searching for metaphors, Robert Frost, poet and patron saint of nature observers, said it better. He would have been a wonderful blogger–he went out every day and wrote down his thoughts on mud puddles and stumps...
Read MoreRed Oak: You Can Go Home Again
This is…home. Top floor apartment, left-hand side. If you suddenly came up behind me and shouted “Where do you live?!”–I swear the first image that would pop into my head would be this one. 6A Old Hickory Drive, Albany, New York. We moved in here when I was in grade school and moved out when I went off to college. The other day I went back there to take a nostalgic look around. And amazingly, it was exactly as I had remembered it–except, of course, that everything had magically shrunk in size. But the houses were the same (my door used to be painted green,...
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