Tag Archives: Upper Peninsula
Ephemeral
I was mortified to learn recently from an online calculator that my life expectancy is 94.64 years. That’s just, well … piggish. This is mostly not my fault. I have good genes and socioeconomic privilege. I don’t understand how to smoke, so I never acquired that vice. I am hard-wired for exercise. Also, I have done what I can to […]
Incorruptible
Spring has scarcely arrived by the human calendar, but signs are everywhere evident in the natural world. Robins are squawking in the tall junipers that grace the town cemetery, where I often walk. The songs of the other birds have become more varied; there is a hint of courtship in the air, though there is no doubt more snow to […]
Food chain
If you feed wild birds long enough, you begin to feel as if you are doing something important. Especially during the winter, when the mercury flirts with zero and every natural food source is blanketed in snow, the birds come to depend on your largesse. In return, they reliably offer pleasures only sporadically available in the realm […]
The birds and the bees
I was enjoying yesterday afternoon in the best possible way: lounging on the deck, a book in one hand, a frosty pint jar of beer in the other. The book was excellent: intelligent, eloquent and occasionally poetic, full of eminently re-readable sentences. Not a one-beer book, in other words. But before I could return from my […]
Ephemeral
Humans look at death after 20, 30, or even 40 years as tragic. In truth, we lack perspective, and, more pointedly, presence; we fail to fully occupy moment after moment, millions upon end. We mistake the distractedness that makes time fly for a lack of time itself. But time is right here, always; it is we who are gone.
Incorruptible
They are incorruptible, these wild things, attuned to the sun and the wind and the ether with a sensitivity long lost to humans. When I lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I learned to gauge the coming of winter by the wholesale departure of Canada geese, hundreds of them splitting the sky in long wedges, calling to each other in voices that felt melancholy as I watched, tethered to what would soon be a snowbound earth.
Food chain
If you feed wild birds long enough, you begin to feel as if you are doing something important. Especially during the winter, when the mercury flirts with zero and every natural food source is blanketed in snow, the birds come to depend on your largesse. In return, they reliably offer pleasures only sporadically available in the realm […]
Cold
Cold reminds us that – like it or not, and despite our insulating conveniences – we are subject to Nature, with all her dangers and beauties. And those beauties are considerable. Cold lends clarity to the landscape, sharpness to the senses. The blue of the sky deepens; the polar snow glitters in the brittle sun and crunches like potato chips beneath booted feet. The air itself seems alive.
Elemental
I wonder at my good fortune to be loved in such a way, to have a person in my life who prizes not only my strength and competence, but the fragile parts, too. Someone who loves not just the attractive swatches of my being, but the whole messy cloth. Someone who would change none of it, and protect all of it.
Chickhood: The end of peep
My four young chickens are 10 weeks old, and a distinguishing feature of childhood — their baby chick voices — has disappeared. I knew this was coming, but I am nonetheless sad; there is something bouyant and endearing in the voice of chicks, a sweet helplessness and insistence that invites protection. The contented peeps and […]
Meditatio Ephemera 