Category Archives: Columns

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

A Teaching Moment

This subject’s been sitting handy on my desk for three weeks now, printed and pushed aside at least twice to allow for bear banter that came to me the same way most things seem to come: by email, phone or personal conversation. So, having now put the bear discussion to rest for a while, let’s take […]

Close Encounter

Although there’s other stuff I could get into, interesting topics I’m confident readers would enjoy, it’s back to black bears — specifically a big Wendell bruin that may be attempting to befriend a dear old friend of mine, himself a large, bearded, bear-like man and gentle giant. Who knows? Maybe the burly four-legged creature thought […]

Photo Finish

I can’t claim shock because I had an idea a neighbor or random passerby had probably seen that bear my dogs and I recently jumped out of a narrow strip of wetland before it tore up five plastic-covered hay bales nestled along an adjacent tree line above. In fact, I was confident additional information would […]

Summer Bear

It started early last week with a startling sound, an invisible burst of energy, a rumble in the jungle, a rustling, brush- and stick-busting sprint by something near and heavy fleeing up the escarpment from a narrow wetland framing the northwestern perimeter of Sunken Meadow. It was a Tuesday morning and the dogs and I […]

Oxbow Summit

It’s a hot, hazy mid-afternoon, storm threatening, me standing atop Mt. Sugarloaf, a Pioneer Valley landmark whose summit view never gets old to an old guy who climbed it often as a kid. Standing beside me on the lower tier of the observation tower is Dr. Marjorie Holland, a scholar passing through old haunts from […]

Slowdown

The summer solstice has passed, gentle summer breezes are intermittently dislodging small white mock orange flower petals and dropping them to the ground by the bulkhead, the Connecticut River temperature had passed 70 degrees, and the American shad run is, for all intents and purposes, over. Although it has been many years since I’ve been […]

Shell, Stone

The loud, sudden, crunching, crashing halt to a power mower’s roar — the kind of sound you’d hate to hear when mowing your lawn — and a maiden voyage to the top of a Pioneer Valley landmark are on the front burner of discussion this week. First, the grinding, earth-rattling sound I heard while walking […]

Mystery Solved

I guess you can teach old dogs new tricks. Again, I learned the hard way. The latest caper began with a lazy, unfortunate fact-checking mistake in a cutline I wrote three weeks ago. Or perhaps it wasn’t laziness at all, but rather just an innocent, misguided assumption about an old, far-too-familiar topic. The problem is that above […]

Springtime Hothouse

Hectic week, saturating overnight rains, torrential at times, backyard brook roiled to a soothing roar. Although it may be impossible, I suspect the upper hayfields I walk each day grew eight inches in a day, downpours soaking our fertile, engorged Earth Mother, pushing seed heads toward the heavens, awaiting bright sunlight to stretch them taller. […]

Meadow Mayhem

I suppose it would have represented unavoidable carnage to most observers. Yes, just another pathetic victim of the modern, mechanized world. But to me, the mangled painted turtle said much more, some of it unprintable in old-fashioned news. It’s spooky in a sense. I had been on the lookout recently for turtles I annually pass […]

Mad Meg theme designed by BrokenCrust for WordPress © | Top