I wish I could say that I grew these. They look delicious, don’t they? So sweet and juicy. The ones I did grow were coming along quite nicely, tiny white and yellow flowers abloom, bees bobbing among the bounty. The berries themselves — tight little balls of pale beige — began to form. Heads down, shyly, half-hidden under their blossom caps. Then they started to flush — just the lightest tint...
Lilacs are flowering everywhere in the Berkshires now — in front yards, along the roadside, in a fallow field where a house once stood. Though seemingly delicate and fragile, lilacs are quite hardy and can live well into their seventh decade. Every spring, their blossoms fill the air with a potent fragrance that’s infused with longing — the mixture of “memory and desire” T. S. Eliot wrote...
The phoebes are busy setting up housekeeping under our eaves. All day long they swoop and whistle to each other — phoebe, phoebe — and pick through the dead grass to line their nests. They’re usually the first of the migratory birds to return to their breeding grounds, harbingers that another spring has arrived, that nature’s ancient rhythms are quickening again. It’s a moment to cherish...
Early one recent morning, I looked out the kitchen window and saw an enormous cat sitting in the breezeway between our house and garage. Its back was towards me, but I could tell that it was watching the bird feeders, no doubt sizing up the breakfast menu. It must have sensed me there, because it suddenly swiveled its head and stared straight at me with yellow eyes. I felt that I was gazing...
It seemed for a time, for most of January actually, that winter had passed us by. We racked up weeks of mild weather when the occasional rain segued into snow which melted politely away by morning. The daffodils started to push up. The witch hazel shimmied with its gaudy gold and crimson tassels. Surely spring was right around the corner? It was our year of magically thinking that we’d dodged...
I love the way snow transforms the world around us in mysterious and beautiful ways. How the mountains disappear into the sky and the fields swell with drifts. How the limbs of the spruces become draped with ermine and the last of the oak leaves — high up in the crown, gloved in white — clap wildly in the wind. Snow lends itself to imagery — from Emily Dickinson’s “leaden sieves” and “alabaster...
I still depend upon printed weekly planners and wall calendars to keep track of my life. There’s something so satisfying about noting down all the important coming events in red ink by hand on actual paper at the beginning of each year. Something childishly exciting about thumbing through the neatly lined Filofax pages to discover what day of the week your birthday or anniversary will fall on...
In this in-between season, before the snow falls, when the light slants at a lower angle, the eye is drawn to what the foliage and flowers had kept hidden: the almost otherworldly beauty of lichens. Splayed across stones, spreading over old walls and rotting wood, lichens thrive in the most unlikely places. From sea level to alpine heights, lichens can grow in Arctic tundra, sandy deserts, rocky...
“We look at the world once, in childhood, the rest is memory,” Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück wrote in her poem “Nostos”. I’ve been thinking about the wisdom of those lines these past few golden weeks in the Berkshires. Working in the garden as the last of the leaves drift down from the maples, I realize how much of what I feel is filtered through the past. The smell of woodsmoke. The...
These early Autumn mornings often arrive cocooned in mist — beautiful, mysterious, and somewhat haunting. There’s nothing necessarily poetic about mist; meteorologically, it’s just the result of longer nights and the warmer earth interacting with the cooler air, causing water droplets to form close to the ground. But it’s hard to look out over a shrouded field, the hills a ghost of a silhouette...
Zinnias are the clowns of the late summer garden. Wacky, sporting mis-matched and often outrageous color combinations, they bob behind the ranks of chic perennials on stalks as long and sturdy as stilts. They’re just too silly to be taken seriously by any self-respecting gardener and yet, by the end of August, they’re often the only colorful things left standing in the border. I’ve come to...
The heat this past week was no joke. It wasn’t the sticky neck or blurry glasses stuff of most mid-summers. Iced tea on the back screen porch was no remedy. Or a fan in a darkened bedroom. This was a mean heat, an in-your-face heat, and its brutish intensity just kept coming. It’s gone now, but it’s the kind of bully that will circle back, pumped up and eager for another round. It made me
Though both moths and butterflies are classified as Lepidoptera and are often confused with one another, there are several anatomical ways to tell them apart. Their antennae, wings, pupae, and eyes are different, though it might take an advanced degree or microscope to notice the minuscule distinctions. Over the last few months, I’ve been developing a
The snake is back in the vegetable garden. I heard him this morning, slithering through the dead leaves between the compost bin and the sprouting raspberry canes. I haven’t seen him yet, but I know what he looks like: a sinuous foot or so of black checkerboard skin with bright yellow racing stripes running down the length of his body. Generations of garter snakes have staked out