Tis the Season: Halloween
I just love Halloween. I can’t wait till October 31 for the spooky season to begin. I’m starting now. If we have to have a holiday that lasts for weeks and weeks, why can’t it be Halloween? Halloween carols, Halloween cards…but please god no shopping for Halloween presents. I’ve been trying to figure out what there is about Halloween that enthralls me so. I don’t like blood and gore. I don’t like movies about crazed killers wearing hockey masks. I don’t like chainsaw massacres. I like mystery. For me, that’s what Halloween is about. It’s the season of fog. The season of darkness coming...
Read MoreThe Dishevelled Cardinal
Thanks to Diane Hale Smith for this photo of a female cardinal having, as she put it, “a bad feather day.” Look at that beak–built like a nutcracker to crush the hard shells of sunflower seeds. Cardinals love feeders as much as we love watching them. Their bright red plumage seems made for inept birdwatchers like me who can never spot the little brown birds hiding high up in the branches. Cardinals don’t flee the snow and cold, they hang around all winter, brightening up the drabbest months. It’s hard to imagine this tiny morsel of a bird surviving subzero...
Read MoreThe Flowerpot Rocks
The Flowerpot Rocks. Such a sweet, grandmotherly name for these giant chunks of stone, each one as big as a breaching whale. They’re found at the head of the Bay of Fundy in Canada, famous for having the highest tidal range in the world. When I read about the Fundy tides, I thought that would mean a dramatic tsunami of water rushing in–but it’s a subtle, almost invisible movement, too slow to notice. The water just creeps inch by inch over chocolate-colored mud flats, and crawls up higher and higher with each gentle wavelet. At low tide, tourists throng around the Flowerpots,...
Read MoreNew England Asters: North of the Border
Welcome to Canada. It’s the foreign country that doesn’t feel like a foreign country. It has gas stations, billboards, McDonalds, and all the elements of American culture. And it has New England asters. But wait a minute. This isn’t New England, it’s New Brunswick (not sure where old Brunswick is.) So how can they be New England asters? I thought it was just one of those common-name things, where the common name for a plant varies locally, but no, they are indeed officially New England asters, even in Latin. Symphyotrichum novae-angliae. They’re native to just...
Read MoreWild Thyme: Bee Harvest
Funds are tight everywhere these days, and one thing that must have gotten slashed from the budget of the Florida, NY Town Hall is mowing. Of course there’s not a lot of lawn to mow in front of the town hall, it’s just a tiny oval island of green in a sea of blacktop. Usually it’s scalped into a brutally short crew cut, but this year they’ve let it run wild. Which is to say, the grass must be quite two inches long. And intermixed with the grass are several large purple patches of thyme. Lying on my stomach on this sun-warmed savory blanket, I can see the honeybees bumbling around among...
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