I’LL BE HONEST–as I always try to be on this page, around our virtual campfire. Sometimes, in this time, it feels like all the life- lessons I learned and tried to absorb–from my beloved Aunt Mary, my parents, my grandparents, and important mentors like Sigurd F. Olson, no longer apply. They just don’t. The only life-lessons that apply in this
FIFTY-THREE YEARS AGO TODAY, the girl I had loved for all four years of college (but she only knew it for one) said ‘I do.’ And made me the happiest, luckiest guy in the whole world. It seems good things are worth waiting for. And patience is a virtue. And stuff like that. Have all the days of the 53
IT IS ONE of my favorite places on the island—the old outhouse—also known as the Church Of Peace. After 30 years here, Kathy intimated that was long enough to wait for a flush toilet and a shower. And so she dreamed and planned and outlined and caused to be built a new guest cottage. Which has both—shower and toilet. But
SOMETIMES STORMS ANNOUNCE themselves. And announce and announce and announce. And rumble and grumble and threaten. And we should believe them when they do. But sometimes they blow up quickly and leave just as fast. Like this one, this little cell that came out of nowhere and whacked Fawn Island with a single, wild squall-line gust— perhaps 70-80 mph. It
AT FAWN ISLAND on Rainy Lake, it has been a bit of a rainy, drizzly, cold and windy day. But things are clearing up a bit this evening. (And the rain is GOOD for moistening the woods and suppressing North Woods forest fires). Meanwhile the 7 year old granddaughter has been practicing casting off the dock. And petting Koda the
THE WARBLER AND THE MADNESS: And so I returned from guiding another group into the wildwood. And it was fine and grand, filled with scarlet tanagers and towhees and wood ducks and 116 other species, including a ridiculously beautiful little yellow warbler caught by photography in mid-song. We lunched on overlooks high above the Mississippi Valley. We wandered among wild
ON THIS WEEK’S Road Scholar expedition in Minnesota’s Bluff Country, fine weather is making everything more enjoyable. 101 species so far including a spectacular Scarlet Tanager and a Turkey Vulture doing his best Count Dracula impression. A highlight was the chance to meet world-renowned birder, author and artist David Allen Sibley and get a couple books signed, at the National
MONUMENTS AND REALITY: When my beloved Great Aunt Mary–essentially my grandmother on my dad’s side–passed away, we gathered up her old shrub rose, over a century of age, and replanted it in our garden. When I was a boy, this wise and gentle woman, an elementary schoolteacher, had tasked me to help care for it, telling me she had done
WITH THE DESPICABLE IDIOCY jokingly referred to as the current American ‘Administration,’ doing so much intentional damage to so many, it is important to remember that life goes on. In all its countless iterations. With its joys and sorrows, sufferings and triumphs, and the in-and-out, moment-to-moment daily breathing of simply being here. This past week I led a birds-and-wildflowers expedition
SO THERE’S THIS THING trees do. They reach for the light. Habitually. Always. Relentlessly and inevitably. This imperative may also be called aspiration. As in, trees aspire toward something. Toward the sun, of course. They never reach it, the trees, not all the way to the glowing sun. But they reach towards it. They aspire. And in doing so they