Did you manage to scrape together a decent reason why you were grateful on Thanksgiving? I trotted out, as I probably do most years, some platitudes about poetry, mainly because poetry offers such an effective antidote to the mundane and obvious. Oh, and it can stave off loneliness and transform despair into irony, all while sitting quietly on the printed page. These
I’ve spent the last few days taking down the garden, cutting back the ranks of shasta daisies and phlox that stood sentinel all summer over the more free-spirited orders of pulmonaria, anemone, and bleeding heart. They’re mostly stubble now, except for a few stands of echinacea that I left for the birds to finish off. It was cold work. But satisfying, too, harking back to the age-old practice...
They’re gone now, the families of ruby-throated hummingbirds who spent the summer with us. The males, with their natty bright red waistcoats, flew south at the beginning of September, leaving behind the females and young. I was puzzled, at first, to see no young males among the crowd that continued to zip from flower to flower in
For a decade, our little town of West Stockbridge held a Zucchini Festival every August. The brainchild of the local Cultural Council, it began as a tongue-in-cheek tribute to that most underappreciated and, by the time August rolled round, largely unwanted garden vegetable. Lenox had its Tanglewood. Becket its Jacob’s Pillow. West Stockbridge?
For the rain it raineth every day — from Twelfth Night
It’s been a month of on and off rain. Dull steady downpours. Wild wind-driven tempests. Lukewarm, almost weightless morning mists. Thunderstorms have been in the forecast nearly every day — for weeks on end. More often than not, the clouds that billow and darken into a mountain of threatening postures
The tissue-thin poppy petals have scattered to the ground just as the dart-shaped buds of the clematis unfurl before our eyes. New shapes and colors are emerging in the garden every day now— and this year, because the spring was so cool and damp, everything seems bigger and brighter than usual. I had to trim dozens of marble-sized pears from the espaliers this week as the branches were already...