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
Spring is arriving in the Berkshires in fits and starts. It’s a slightly disorienting, in-between time. The sun is higher and stronger, but the trees are just beginning to leaf out, and the harsh bright light can be blinding. It’s cold enough some nights to have a fire, but it’s often still daylight when we sit down to dinner. Except for the bright chrome yellow splashes of...
I woke up in the middle of the night and heard the wild geese overhead. Their cries seemed to go on and on. This is the time of year when hundreds of thousands of birds are migrating across the skies under the cover of darkness. The Berkshire fields may still be a sodden uniform beige, but everywhere around us life is stirring. The witch hazel has been in gaudy bloom for almost a month now...
It snowed last night. It’s snowing now. It will snow through the afternoon. There’s been a rhythm and repetitiveness to this winter’s weather that’s a bit like a Latin conjugation: amo, amas, amat. Though there’s been very little to love about these past weeks of dead batteries and leaking roofs. Despite Valentine’s Day, there’s no sweet-talking...
I sensed her — a blur in the woods, a fresh set of tracks in the snow — before I saw her. At times, when the feeders were usually aflutter with activity, the birds would suddenly vanish. I had the unsettling sensation of being watched. And then one morning, hunger or familiarity emboldening her, she trotted out of the woods: a red fox with black socks and the triangular facial features that...
This is the time of year when the contours of the Berkshire hills once again dominate the view. Gentle and curvaceous, they recline against the winter landscape, silent as the snow that often covers their flanks. Melville imagined Mount Greylock which filled his vista to the north as a white whale breaching the surface: Moby-Dick in all his ferocious beauty. Harvey Mountain, which looms above us...