Tulips: Old Masters
This is the most bustling, enticing, delicious farmer’s market I’ve ever been to. Local spring greens, potatoes, herbs, leeks. Muffins, honey, goat cheese, maple syrup. And flowers, flowers, flowers, flowers. The famous Greenmarket in Union Square. Funny, I had to go to New York City to find flowers blooming. It was a refined form of torture for me to have to walk past dozens of stalls selling plants of every description, and not be able to buy any. But the daffodils and the pansies wouldn’t survive being stuffed in a backpack and carted around the city. And it’s not...
Read MoreFlocks: Guest Photographer Diane Hale Smith
Thanks to Diane Hale Smith for these beautiful photographs! It’s spring. Really it is, in spite of the weather. The birds know. They can tell because there’s more light in the world. The days are longer, the nights are shrinking, and they know it’s time to move. Huge groups of starlings, red-winged blackbirds, and grackles are swooping around, back from their winter spent in warmer climates. They’re complaining loudly about the frigid weather up here. They’re waiting impatiently, like the rest of us, for the weather to warm up. And my favorites, the crows, are still hanging out in their...
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 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 MoreMy Friend Bud
Under the snow, the leaves of spring are waiting. Thanks to Wells Horton for capturing this photo. http://wells-horton.smugmug.com/ One of my naturalist friends, Glenn Humphrey, likes to teach kids about “my friend Bud.” Buds, in strict botanic terminology, are those little brown bumps on the ends of twigs that no one ever notices. Until one fine day, when the little bumps burst open and reveal the leaves and blossoms of spring we’re all panting for. As miraculous as a chick hatching out of its shell. But when did Bud start incubating those baby leaves? Last spring. At the...
Read MoreRed Orange Yellow Day
It’s the last day of January. The dead of winter. Long ago, I had a terrific boss who insisted that every year the staff celebrate Red Orange Yellow Day. I’m not sure if he made it up, or if there really is such a thing. The celebration was always held in January, a month famous for gray skies, dirt-speckled snow, and cold toes. I guess the idea was to brighten everyone up through the mid-winter blues, and it certainly brightened the office, as every on the staff wore the requisite colors and shared a pot-luck lunch of salsa, ziti, orange juice, rainbow sherbet, lemon meringue...
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