Funkins
Funkins. These are not only artificial pumpkins. They are artificial pumpkins that you can carve. You carve the plastic shell with a knife, and make a face in the plastic side of the plastic pumpkin, and then I suppose you light it with an electric candle. What is our nation coming to when our youth can’t muck around with sharp knives, play with matches, and get slimy with pumpkin guts? No seeds to roast. No sharp smell of smoke as the candle burns the top of the pumpkin lid. No chance to watch the pumpkin slowly decompose during the week after Halloween as the smile turns into a...
Read MoreViper’s Bugloss: Snake in the Grass
This lovely snake is not a viper, far from it–a more harmless and gentle little creature never lived. It’s a grass snake, also known as a green snake, who crossed my path on a hiking trail in New Brunswick, and obligingly posed for photographs before melting into the ferns on the side of the trail. Funny, when I parked the car at the trailhead, I noticed a beautiful blue plant lurking next to the garbage can–viper’s bugloss. A strange name. It’s a Eurasian import, and “Bugloss” has ancient Greek roots meaning ox tongue, which probably refers to the...
Read MoreTis 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...
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