And so, remember this, life is no abyssSomewhere there’s a bluebird of happiness ~ Sandor Harmati Twenty-five years ago, we made a major addition to our house that expanded the kitchen and featured a string of large windows overlooking the back yard with a view to the mountains on the north. Originally, I put up […]
Category Archives: animals
It’s still dark outside, but the older cat yowls in the darkness, expressing some real or imaginary complaint. The dog stirs and “boops” me under the side of the covers to see if it’s time to get up. I rub her nose and eyes then “scritch” her back to see if she’ll settle back down. […]
Humans need to find peace and quiet. Any parent has reached their screaming point from all the chaos that children and jobs can bring into their lives, but we all occasionally need some calming, uninterrupted time for our brain to settle down and clear out our thoughts. For some, a walk in the woods or […]
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare We called them ‘doodle bugs,’ but a girl I knew called them ‘rolly-pollys.’ When in college, I learned they were actually ‘wood lice’ or the singular, ‘woodlouse.’ Wikipedia lists about fifty other names for these guys, not including […]
“Urban areas … have long been deemed to be devoid of biodiversity, especially by Americans, who glorify wilderness and believe that nature can flourish only where cities do not exist… This is called ‘the biological deserts fallacy’” ~ Janet Marinelli There are coyotes in Los Angeles and photos of rats stealing old pizza in Manhattan, […]
“We can no longer afford to consider air and water common property, free to be abused by anyone without regard to consequences. Instead we should begin now to treat them as scarce resources, which we are no more free to contaminate than we are free to throw garbage into our neighbor’s yard.” ~ President […]
“In 2020, locusts have swarmed in large numbers in dozens of countries, including Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Somalia, Eritrea, India, Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, Oman and Saudi Arabia. When swarms affect several countries at once in very large numbers, it is known as a plague.” ~ David Njagi This summer, the seventeen-year eruption of cicadas will […]
Our young dog, Rosie, is timid, and it takes a long while for her to get used to “new” people. She is unlike dogs who have owned me in the past — usually very eager to interact with people, sometimes to the point of annoyance. Rosie is a medium sized white pup with a charming […]
“As factories grew quiet and traffic dropped, ozone levels fell by 7 percent across the Northern Hemisphere. As air pollution across India dropped by a third, mountain snowpacks in the Indus Basin grew brighter. With less haze in the atmosphere, the sky let more sunlight through. The planet’s temperature temporarily jumped between a fifth and half of a degree.” […]
“I think we are still grappling with a narrow view of nature and wildness, that this is remote and faraway and we must travel to find nature in some distant place. What we need to appreciate and connect with is the nature all around us, the nature near to where we live and work and […]
Writes of Nature 