Earlier this week I let Berkeley out and forgot him. Berkeley is a standard poodle, large and gray and curly, and we call him Bezerk-ely. As a puppy he was untrainable, completely. He only listens when he agrees the proposition is a good idea. He has figured out how
Grace is load-bearing. It holds us up and binds us together. Nobody sees it, and we recognize all that it’s been carrying only after the weight has been relieved. The nor'easter came in over the last weekend and stayed. By the end of it, the pond
Earlier this week, walking home from work along the spillway, I came around the bend, and something large and dark was already moving away from me, heaving itself across the mulch toward the water. Too big for a muskrat. Too long. The tail was wrong, thick at the base and
The bird crossed low over the far goal just as something happened on the field that I would spend the rest of the half trying to piece together. Heavier than a jay, smaller than a hawk, gone before I could ask the parent next to me what it was. It
I was at a table with friends, stuffing auction brochures and donor lists into programs for the fundraiser — the kind of work that's more useful than it is interesting, the sort that's easier with many hands and something to talk about while you do it. My
Wendell Berry died this past Monday in the Kentucky farmhouse where he spent most of his ninety-two years learning what one acre could teach a man willing to stay. I heard the news sideways, mid-afternoon, in the middle of something else, the way the news that matters most
Empty places do not fill themselves. Someone gives, and someone receives. Nothing that has gone empty fills itself back up by wanting to. Two weeks ago the ground at the pond's edge was bare enough to walk on, dry enough that you could forget it had ever been
I worried all week that I would miss the chance to share a gift. But it turns out I have a lot to learn about peaches. The pond is still delicate this week. Not clear, not settled, the water carrying more than it should. That is simply where we are
Filamentous strands are thickening near the spillway, and the round dot colonies, nitella, are spreading across the shallows...
Some clarity only comes after everything gets stirred up first. Before it can settle, it has to churn. That's simply what happens every year around this time in a pond, and apparently in a life. St. John's Pond has gone through its turnover, right on schedule.
The finches never asked permission. They arrived on the porch in Dublin in June, built a nest over the one door we never use, and raised their young in full view of our living room window without so much as a nod in our direction. We did not invite them.
Dublin, NH Stand still in the shallows at Dublin long enough and they find your feet. Minnows, a dozen, then more, nosing at your ankles and toes in what my family has come to call, with more affection than accuracy, a pedicure. Pescatory pedicures. And this year they were more