I’m assuming pheasant season opened with a bang Saturday. I wasn’t there to witness it. Why buck opening-day crowds? That’s my motto. Crowded coverts are not for me. But I’m not here to chat about hunting today. We have other issues, ones I pushed onto the backburner last week after learning of an old Whately […]

A familiar landscape it was, viewed from a new vista, flavored by a soft southern breeze that helped inflate a solemn affair with a touch of charm. Old friend Dave Scott, ninth-generation farmer on a proud Whately spread — that alone worthy of tribute — was being laid to rest at a place of his […]

Here I sit, once again wondering where I’m headed, akin to taking an old path through new woods. Unafraid, I’m confident I’ll find my way back to the truck one way or another. So why not stretch my legs and see where they take me? I know where I should be going. It’s the final […]

With grandson Jordi in town for Labor Day weekend, I was sleeping in a small upstairs room when my wife appeared at the door after 4 a.m. Sunday. “Honey?” “Yeah.” “Sorry to wake you. A cop just left. He said a neighbor complained that Buddy was barking and there’s a skunk in the kennel.” “How […]

A lot of questions, few answers: That’s what’s facing me this week, especially Tuesday, on what would have been my late son’s 29th birthday. I remember Gary’s 1982 birth well. There I was, marching with a bare-bones, pick-up softball team toward the annual Athol Labor Day Tournament finals, and my wife went into labor around […]

A light-gray silt film covering the dense, green, wild-rosebush border showed the water line from Sunday’s flash flood that inundated Sunken Meadow. It was head-high, maybe even a little over six feet, and had deposited a significant layer of what looked like clay throughout the Christmas tree farm, the blanket deepest in the depressions, where […]

Had Mike Flanagan been told that Gary Sanderson would publish a story about UMass memories after his death, he probably would have flashed that wry, crooked grin I remember well and quipped, “Bags? Uh-oh!” But I’m not here to dust off skeletons from the closets at the 20 Ball Lane, Amherst bungalow we once called […]

I always look forward to early summer when my raspberries and blueberries ripen and I can go outside, pick and drop them atop a fresh bowl of cereal before returning to the kitchen, pouring in milk and mixing it up with a tablespoon. Although the berries have gone by, I can now buy local peaches, […]

Old buddy Richie Kellogg — Big R — phoned Monday morning to renew a summer-long discussion about a rogue black bear that’s been frequenting his Wendell neighborhood. The first time he called, in May or early June, he was concerned because this bear was injured, had destroyed his bird feeders and didn’t seem to be […]

I would guess that many people who poke around in the woods like me have, upon entering a beech grove or passing an extraordinary beech tree, stopped out of curiosity to scratch at the ground searching for nuts to crack open looking for meat. I also imagine that these folks have come away as perplexed […]