Category Archives: Columns

Published pieces I’ve written, primarily in The Recorder, Greenfield, Mass.

Deer, Turkeys And Deaf Ears

It’s early summer and wildlife sightings are coming at me like bugs at a streetlamp. One, emanating from an old South Deerfield friend of my late sons, Gary and Rynie, reported five nice whitetail bucks in velvet feeding and enjoying each other’s company in a lush, clover-laced hayfield. “Is that unusual?” he wrote. “We’re not […]

The Season Of Plenty

Looks like it’ll be a great year for raspberries. Blueberries, too, if my own are any indication. That’s what I was telling the woman ringing up my morning purchase of lettuce, radishes, cukes, beet greens, zucchini and summer squash earlier this week. Oh, how I love the season of berries and vegetables and fruits, the […]

Nature’s Ways

Nature’s riddles and mysteries can at times really get your wheels spinning. Then again, when you stay active, probe the intricacies of place, and ponder all the possibilities, well, doesn’t such bewilderment keep life worth living? A case in point is my recent avoidance of a nesting sanctuary along a Green-River floodplain bordered on the […]

Anadromous Countdown

As the spectacular strawberry moon wanes in the midnight sky, the sweet scent of wild rose fills the meadow, pink weigelas are in full, fragrant bloom, and mock oranges are opening their buds to white blossoms, adding another subtle dimension of spring sweetness. Yes, signs abound of a slow spring transitioning into summer, including a […]

Nesting Season

Sunday morning, after 8, sunny sky, still air. I’m driving between fields to a fork in the road south of my Greenfield Meadows home. There, in a calm, waist-high hayfield, stands a thin, healthy, mature doe, tail slowly twitching from side to side as she feeds toward the woods less than 100 yards west. It’s […]

Showtime At Sunken Meadow

It was a gray, wet, low-pressure Tuesday afternoon, about 4 o’clock, and I was wearing light, fast-drying athletic shorts and Classic-Clog Crocs, running the dogs through saturated, waist-high grass. Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s tick season; and, yes, I have been finding the annoying little buggers lately. Saturday, I even medicated the dogs for the […]

Record-Breaking Shad Surge

With turkey season in the rearview, irises bloom, Memorial Day looms and woodstoves limp to the finish line, burning just hot enough to kill the chill as hayfields, soon to harbor newborn fawns, whine for their first cut. Overall, it’s been a cool May, one that’s apparently excellent  for American shad migrating up the Connecticut […]

Tempting Fate

Ominous swords of Damocles have leaned out over my daily path for years — first three, then two, now one; same species, same size, same menacing presence. Yet there we were last Dec. 1, my friend and I, with the help of an aluminum, 24-foot extension ladder, harvesting five pounds of late oyster mushrooms from what is […]

Open The Gate

A day late and a dollar short, it’s time to include me in the chorus of support for Paul Luippold’s plea to reopen the old, padlocked boat-access just downstream from Stillwater Bridge. Luippold’s written complaint — dated May 1 and addressed to two local news companies, a chief of police and two state politicians — […]

Sing Praise For His Yankee Ways

My dad’s sun set last Thursday morning. A glorious setting it was, peacefully ending the life of a man three days short of 89. He had a good life, a dream death. How can you beat it? After maybe a half-hour in the yard digging up dandelions, he must have been tired. Job complete, he neatly […]

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