The Rural Sublime

...the only sensible impression left is, "I am nothing!" –Coleridge Farmwives conjure elaborate quilts. Woodworkers busy themselves at their stations. No shortage at all of craftspeople here, but however deft these artisans,…

Assumptions and Cullings

I sometimes come on headstones in backwoods graveyards girt by their own shallow graves the size of bathtubs and by brush, through which each one juts valiantly upward. Lately, whenever I take to my local river, small cavities in either…

Partners & Pardners

In the pre-op room, my wife was given a scalene block for a brief procedure. She had shoulder surgery three months back, and now again they’ll anesthetize her to break up scars that have kept her in pain. She’ll be comatose, however…

2019

Some are apt to swoon over nature, loving what they call harmony. But Tennyson got it right on whoever Trusted God was love indeed And love Creation's final law, saying Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek'd against his creed. The…

My Tribe & I

In a characteristically compelling essay called “Grub: A Man in the Market,”1 Garret Keizer briefly muses on his distaste for upper New England farmers’ markets. He concedes that those institutions appeal to what his wife Kathy calls “our…

Irruption

At dawn today, the fog still slept on the river. The sun of a seemingly endless, Hadean heat wave had not yet broken through, so I drove to the launch for a paddle. Green herons, smart as sentries, patrolled one bank. A beaver sculled beside…