We broke onto the field beneath one of the most beautiful examples of evanescence I’d ever seen.
Author: John Messeder
Smells of new rain
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Harvest season has begun in the Couple Acre Wood.
We stand still among the trees, the dog and I, and listen to hickory nuts, some whole and some in the pieces remaining from the ongoing repast of Eastern gray squirrels, clattering from the canopy like balls in a wooden pachinko machine.
Continue reading Smells of new rain
A bug hunting dog
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One recent morning as we headed out on our morning mission in the Couple Acre Wood, my young dog-buddy became captured by a decomposing hickory log. We had passed it numerous times, but this time it grabbed him by the nose and wouldn’t let go.
Continue reading A bug hunting dogMake America Great (baby factories) Again!
Apparently there still are many among us who believe women are for the singular purpose making babies. I’m betting there are many among us who are old enough to remember when “boys will be boys” and “girls will be chaste.” Sex was to be enjoyed by the former, but employed only for making babies by the latter.
Good evening, eyeshine
One of the coolest scenes in the woods is when I go out with the pup after dark. I wear a headlight so I can find my way over and around the chainsawed tree trunks and busted branches — my eyes not being as good in the dark as Bowie’s, or the neighbors’ cats whose eyes I count glowing in pairs from their hunting posts in the Couple Acre Wood.
Getting out of the car
If I fall in the woods while being tugged vigorously by the pup at the at the end of a 26-foot leash, I occasionally get to brag because the aforementioned pup — who likely contributed significantly to my being on my backside on the ground — comes back to sit beside me until I feel like hoisting myself back to my feet, at which point he resumes his tugging, searching for whatever next grabs his attention.
Continue reading Getting out of the car
Flight Behavior: a review
When I was a kid left alone to pull weeds from the family garden, I could often be found sitting beside the plants, reading a historical novel by the likes of Leon Uris, whose “Trinity,” taught me about “the Troubles” of Northern Ireland and “Exodus,” about the Jews trying to escape Hitler.
Continue reading Flight Behavior: a reviewRaindrops and waterfalls
Standing in the rain in the middle of the forest. Individual rain drops tap the hickory leaves, then slide off onto my hat and face and then to the ground. I try to listen to the drops falling farther from me, but they become millions and blend into a low roar.
Continue reading Raindrops and waterfalls
Wandering the couple-acre wood
The dogwood outside my window has turned bright pink, speckled with green as the chlorophyll machinery deploys to process the warming sunlight. Nearby, a plethora of ground plants have for weeks decorated the forest floor. Some of them soon will disappear or fade-to-green as the taller hickories and oaks leaf into sun-blocking umbrellas.
Bees have begun to find the blossoms of the ground-hugging Spring Beauties, Dead Nettles (so-named because they do not sting the way real nettles do) and other ephemeral decorations. And the show-offs of the springtime plant world, the daffodils.
A wannabe great mouser
He doesn’t know it, but the canine who accompanies me on our daily wanders through the nearby woods is pretty great at finding Wood mice. He can smell ‘em, and probably hear ‘em. Unfortunately, he so far has not seen ‘em.
Continue reading A wannabe great mouserAnother trip around the sun
From my keyboard I watch outside my window, as though viewing a performance mounted on stage or screen, a pair of House Sparrows building a nest for a crop of chicks the seeds of which I saw a black-bibbed male plant yesterday.
I saw my first bumblebee the other afternoon. Not a honeybee; honeybees will appear later in the month, if experience holds. Carpenter bees, on the other hand, already are scouting for drill sites.
Continue reading Another trip around the sunThe last milkman
One of my earliest memories was as a kid living in a fifth-floor walkup apartment on the west side of Manhattan, NYC.
My weekly chore from probably about six years old was to place the week’s collection of trash into the big galvanized containers in the basement, where the trashman would come by once a week to collect the contents. Luckily, I did not have to carry the trash down the stairs into the basement. We had a dumbwaiter.
Continue reading The last milkmanWandering with Mr. Snuffles, er, Bowie
A few years have passed since a dog has shared our home. I’ve missed that. We filled that hole in December and have since been privy to an exercise in mutual education.
For instance, as well-mannered as he normally is, he does not like being in second place to my laptop which, during our dog-less period, I had become used to reading during quiet times in my recliner.
Continue reading Wandering with Mr. Snuffles, er, Bowie
Taking inventory
I have learned to talk nice to our lawn mower. My spouse tells me if I am friendly to the machine, it will work better, or at least longer. It makes sense, sort of.
The thing is, I’m not a lawn mowing kind of guy. Grass has been growing and dying and growing back for a very long time, with no human help necessary.
In the world according to Sam Emery, every time we mow a lawn some Arabian princess strings another bauble on her charm bracelet. I do it, though, because I love the person who thinks it needs done and sometimes she can’t do it.
Sky sponsored by Exxon
It’s early morning in Rivendell, a smoke-cloaked fantasyland outside my back door. Hobbits and dwarfs sit with their morning coffee around kitchen tables in stone huts along pathways pressed by millions of footfalls through the forest on the far side of the glen.
This close to July, the morning sun should have the air warmed to near-80 but this morning it is only about 60, reflecting the reason the sun is a hazy gray over the land as smoke from numerous forest fires, blown from eastern Canada to the midwestern states of Ohio and Illinois and now back to the eastern Manor of Maske—known less imaginatively as the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
The first letter in STEM
The trial is over in the case of Held v. The State of Montana. The lawyers have performed their roles on the judicial stage. Now we wait, a few weeks probably, several months possibly, for the lone critic to review the material and render a ruling.
The question? Is Montana, one of three states in the Union to have added so-called “green” amendments to their constitutions— the others being New York and Pennsylvania—keeping its constitutional promise to provide and protect the environment its young people hope to grow old in? Sixteen of those young people completed their mission in court this week to voice a resounding No!
Youth seek future in court
For the past several years, I have been among those predicting our youth would have to resolve the problems we oldsters have wrought upon our home. It turns out, they’re already at it – and doing more than merely crying out, “OK, Boomer!” when they detect a problem.
Monday, a group of young people—ages from early teens to mid-20s— became first in the nation to present their case in a state courtroom as they sued the state of Montana for failing its constitutional mandate to clean up the air and water we all depend on for continued life aboard Starship Earth.
Profits over science mark SCOTUS decision
Wetlands— those swampy areas we sometimes encounter as we wander through our forests and other undeveloped acres—may seem like wasted land, but they are hard at work reducing flood risk during heavy rain events and filtering to provide safe drinking water for plants and other critters, including us humans.
A dark and stormy night
The day started the way a spring Dad-with-13-year-old motorcycling day should start: sunny but not too much heat. It was a post-Navy-retirement run from Norfolk, Virginia where I had spent the previous eight years to Maine, where I was raised.
Night One was Locust Lake State Park, near Mahanoy City, PA. We filled out tummies at a Main Street diner named, Angela’s, populated mostly by old men who enthralled my eldest offspring with tales of the glory days of anthracite coal. It was they who pointed us to the Blaschak coal breaker at the west end of town.
540 feet
From my front yard, I watch the sun creep over the hill behind my shoulder lighting the street in front of me, beginning from the far end and slowly illuminating the blackness before me like a Mother peeling the blanket from her child’s sleepy head.
I live at approximately 540 feet above sea level. Some forecasters occasionally bemoan melting glaciers and rising sea levels, but I know it will be a long time before the Atlantic Ocean laps at my door.