The moon the past few nights, when we could see it at all, has been amazingly bright, like a humongous spotlight angling through the trees, casting stick shadows across my desk. The grass between my home and the woods is sparkling, as though a troop of elves has danced across the greensward scattering powdered diamonds.
Category: Environment
On being thankful
“Here we go again,” Granddaughter Kass said one Thanksgiving mealtime as I prepared to “say Grace.” She knew I don’t normally subscribe to the pre-formatted version of my childhood:
“Bless us Oh Lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ Our Lord, amen.”
We are not alone
It was like standing on the edge of a pool, watching the trees change color as a river of fog flowed over the far ridge, filling the valley in front of me, flowing up the slope to gently, silently wrap itself around me.
The fog condensed on the leaves of pines and Scarlet oaks, collecting into drops that fell gently onto my shirtless shoulders. Trees shivered at the impending winter, shaking blizzards of expired summer raiment cascading to the soil. Even as they fade into the soil, the leaves create a kaleidoscope of color, illustrating the diversity of life surrounding me.
Trust the experts
During the debate last week between Republican incumbent Dan Moul and Democrat challenger Marty Qually, a question was asked about our response to Covid.
Qually pointed out the challenge of getting everyone to believe the science.
“We’ve got to get to a point where we believe the people who are specialists in these areas,” he said. “We believe in the people who make our cars, that they won’t explode on us, but we don’t want to believe the doctors – people who we trust every time we go to get medicine.”
Moul agreed with his opponent about a need for personal responsibility, then added, “When you have elected officials that really don’t know a thing about medicine – they’re not scientists.”
CWD and deer baiting
It’s fall in Adams County and the South Mountains of South Central Pennsylvania. A variety of native trees, like an artist’s brushes, color the land in oranges, yellows and reds as though they had been spilled on an artist’s palette. As I stood talking with Pa. Forest Ranger Scott Greevy, acorns fell from the surrounding oaks, crashing like gunfire onto his truck.
Deer hunting season was about to open and our main topic was an illness carried by Whitetail deer.
Caution: contagious colors
When I was many years younger, I cut wood in summer, pulled it from the forest, then chopped and split it into stove-size pieces and stacked it neatly to dry for winter.
Winter was cold in those days, though as a youngster I only felt it when there were chores to do. Snowball fights and sledding were not cold. Bringing in firewood and water from the well were frigid activities.
Hard cider and wilderness
More than 100 members of the South Mountain Partnership gathered Friday to celebrate “the Power of Partnership” in preserving and marketing the South Mountain Region. The gathering was held Friday at the Hauser Hill Event Center, in Franklin Township.
Water standards leave questions
When I was a kid, I practically lived summers in a 500-acre lake, a nearby river and a few streams. My favorite activity after hours of hot labor was to peel down and join the loons and beavers watching fish. (The loons would eat some of them, but many years would pass before I got a taste for raw piscatorial cuisine. I still like it better cooked.)
Where’s the money?
“Operator, will you help me place this call.” The opening line of a Jim Croce song reminds me of the days when my aunt was a Bell telephone operator – one of those women without whose assistance one could not make a telephone call to a town 15 miles away. Telephone operators in those early days had their fingers on the pulse – and the actual wires carrying the conversations – within their domains.
We can almost see it from here
The evening news this week has treated us to newly recorded images of many objects which, at the time the they were sent to earth, may no longer have existed. In the time taken for light to travel from the as yet unknown end of the universe, stars previously unknown have birthed and died.
The cost of irrigation
It’s amazing how quickly things can change. Like when you have 45 minutes to get to a meeting so you decide to take a quick look at your email, and find yourself 15 minutes late.
Land development is like that. Twenty years ago, there was one traffic light on York Road – at the Walmart – on the York Road commercial district east of Gettysburg Borough. A few years later, there were six. The Giant had moved from in-town, where it was walking distance from many residents, to out-of-town, where it wasn’t.
Mountaintops and beaches
It has been noted by people who calculate such things that if the 4.5 billion years this planet has been a-making were converted to a 24-hour clock, we humans have been here less than five minutes. Sixty-six million years ago, give or take a few months, what must have looked to the universe to be a small pebble hurtled through the blackness we humans would eventually call “space” and crashed into a larger rock circling what humans eventually would call The Sun.
Mental meanderings
Grandma and her offspring’s offspring lit out for Classic Movie night at the theater. I get to sit in the backyard, write a column, and watch fireflies.
The town next door
We do not usually think of it until the opportunity has passed, but it sometimes pays to notice what is happening in the town next door. Case in point:
The time is NOW
The gunman was said to have been armed with a rifle and a handgun when he took control of a classroom in the Texas elementary school Tuesday.
“He shot and killed, horrifically, incomprehensibly, 14 students and killed a teacher,” (Texas Gov. Greg Abbott) was quoted in published reports later that day.
Ten-amp service
Most of us think of things like water and electricity as just something that’s there. Something we can, and do, depend upon.
Reaching for the hem of Heaven
I love watching the stars, like LED Christmas lights pinned to a blanket stretched like a child’s bedroom tent over my head. They all seem to be the same distance from where I lay, just out of reach of my fingers, though in my mind I know the distances from me to them varies.
85k acres of live shows
Imagine a movie in which you could walk around among the characters and activities. You can reach out and touch them, talk with them, and see them interact with each other.
Wandering in the forest is like that, where you’re an actor in a perpetually changing story, where trees are the stars of the show, providing the environment for the panoply of other characters.
Most invasive species
We humans think we are special, and we are, but we are not quite unique. We have many similarities to many other inhabitants of our biosphere.
We have hearts and lungs and brains. Even fish have the same organs except notably, they breathe through gills that enable them to extract oxygen to fuel the rest of their machinery.
Call for reusable cups
The pandemic has been a boon to plastics makers. Nowhere is that more obvious than in hospitals. It seems nearly everything in the hospital is plastic, single-use.
They once provided a cup of ice and a pitcher for the patient to have a steady supply of water. Since the pandemic set in, water refills come each in a new cup, which goes, when emptied, in the landfill.
Another plastic peskiness comes with take-out food. I have to remember to tell the person handing my dinner that I am eating at home and have no need for another set of plastic knives and forks.