Whew! What a week, what a day and, finally, here I sit at my favorite perch, one distraction after another keeping me away Monday and Tuesday.

Still, the Spartan walnut chair softened by a thick red cushion is comfy, and life is good. The tall clock just struck noon as I walked from the shower to my raised flagstone terrace outside. There I discretely toweled off and brushed through the tangles in my wet, flowing locks. Truth told, it’s awfully late to start my column, which I prefer to pound out a day or two earlier, leaving time to pick away, tinker, add splashes of color here and there, maybe even occasional daggers for targets I suspect listen. No such luxuries this week. Nope. At this point I gotta just let ’er rip unfiltered and see where it goes. Ah, yes, dangerous indeed with a mischievous mind working. Then again, some with whom I most often correspond suggest I’m at my best when spontaneous, impulsive and raw. Although I can’t say I agree, there’s no choice today. Deadline is approaching like darkness to the  evening deer stand, twilight to the daybreak riffle.

I must say this new sliver of a Sturgeon Moon has brought in the most refreshing, invigorating air, crisp and clear on morning rambles with the dogs, the cool, refreshing summer breeze blowing from the north Monday and Tuesday when — ah! — it seemed life couldn’t be better, yard work notwithstanding. But, hey, even yard work ain’t bad in weather like this. Whether toiling with loppers, clippers or pruning saw to overfill the wheelbarrow or just out running the dogs in green, wild nirvana, I enjoy being alone with my thoughts, many of them, all connected; some appear and pass like a bad odor, others linger, intensify and design an intricate labyrinth to new frontiers; then even brief detours to troubling places, all of the thoughts swirling through your brain and sparking internal conversation during repetitious, mundane chores. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit that these days it seems some of my best conversations are with myself, always trying to complete the big picture, one with hidden chambers contributing to obvious conclusions. I call it processing thoughts, and for me it works best walking alone, even in the rain. What’s disheartening is the realization that just when you get to the point where you’ve figured it out and know you have much to live for, you know your days are numbered. Who knows what’s next? Hopefully we start where we left off.

But enough of that, back to the task at hand, which is shaping up as a ramble fueled by personal observations the past few days, not to mention internal queries, such as this Sturgeon Moon slouching like a vertical hammock in the night sky. The Indians associated this moon with sturgeon, so the month of August must have been significant in their relationship to this a strange, prehistoric-looking fish native to our Connecticut River. My question is why were sturgeon so important to the Indians, and what besides food did they provide? Just curious. Fact is, probably no one knows. Indians left no written history. But I sure would like to know because the unknown fascinates me more than the obvious.

Actually, I tried to get going on this weekly writing chore Tuesday afternoon around 3, two days of trimming hedges and tidying up the yard in the rear view. I sat down, wrote a paragraph I knew I wouldn’t be happy with as a lead, went into the kitchen to pour a fresh cup of coffee, returned to my desk and discovered that my computer had shut down and re-booted. Uh-oh, I thought, and, sure enough, after signing on, I was greeted by a disturbing message from my Norton anti-virus program. After a few unsuccessful tries to remedy the problem with quick-fix links, I knew my day was done and went through the familiar process of cleaning out temporary Internet files, running chkdsk, and performing a time-consuming full-system scan, which takes hours. Hopefully, those drastic measures would solve the problem and allow me to fire-up the machine Wednesday morning without further troubles. No such luck. When I returned home from work Tuesday just before midnight and checked the computer, I knew morning phone work would be necessary. Oh well, I’d get through it, and off to bed I trudged, stopping midway in the dining room to leave my clothes in a pile on the seat of a leather, burgundy wing chair, my Birkenstocks tucked underneath, out of the way.

Oh yeah. I left out the UPS delivery of a book that came to my doorstep Tuesday evening around 6, after I had departed for work. My wife accepted the package and left it out on the counter for me. She didn’t know I was expecting it: “The Books in My Life” by infamous American author Henry Miller, a controversial expatriate and wordsmith extraordinaire whose books were banned here and in England into the early Sixties. Tell me, how can a man wired like me, or any avid reader for that matter, not be attracted to novels the government wants hidden from the eyes of its citizens? In my way of thinking, that’s gotta be some mighty interesting reading. Just me, I guess. Anyway, I had several times in the past thought about buying the book before deciding it was too pricey. Then I finally broke down late last week and bought it online in paperback, which I’ll liberally mark up, unlike my hardcovers. Who knows? I may even wind up buying the hardcover if I decide it’s a must-have for posterity, not to mention future “corruption” of my grandsons.

Eager for a little taste of the book Wednesday morning before running the dogs and embarking on my column, I arose early and started reading out in the green parlor off the midriff inset porch before my wife got up, poured her coffee and started preparing for work in another room, out by the carriage sheds where she gets her morning boob-tube fix, usually the Today Show. She passed through a few times on her normal morning routine before cutting up a delicious cantaloupe and hollering goodbye on her way out the door to work. I heard her car start and saw it heading down the driveway when I caught a vaguely familiar sound I didn’t like. It sounded like a flat tire to me, so I jumped up and dialed her cell phone from the kitchen. She picked up on the third ring, had already figured out her problem and turned around to head home. She parked on flat ground in the driveway, left her car behind and drove my truck to work. So then, column and dogs looming larger by the second, I had an unwelcome project on my hands, one that promised to consume time I didn’t have. Just one of those weeks, I guess. Maybe that new Sturgeon Moon is the culprit.

With no time to waste, I fetched a four-way lug wrench propped against the carriage-shed wall by the red cupboard, laid it by the car and went into the barn — all the doors open to circulate dry, refreshing air throughout — where I retrieved a heavy hydraulic floor jack and one of the four studded snow tires stacked and inflated on rims along a cubby-hole wall. I then returned to the flat and loosened the five lug nuts before jacking the car up and removing the tire, which had picked up a small screw somewhere in my wife’s travels. I threw the flat in the trunk, put the snow tire on and drove up the Brook Road gorge to John Allen’s garage on the ridge above, where I left the tire, briefly exchanged pleasantries and headed back home to walk the dogs, clock ticking valuable minutes into oblivion.

But I still had to deal first with my computer issues. So, upon entering my home, I went inside, called Comcast and a rep gave me the toll-free Norton technical-support number, which I called and got a rep who asked a few questions before remotely commandeering my computer from afar, probably, judging by the name of the woman, in Bangladesh or somewhere not far from there. She assured me she’d have the problem fixed by the time I fed the dogs and returned from a brisk, two-mile romp with them. She didn’t lie. When I got back to my computer, sure enough, my old Norton software had been removed, replaced by a newer version and I was ready to roll once I ate some of that succulent neighborhood melon my wife had cut up, showered and dressed. Then the fun began: crafting a column on the heels of pig-piling distractions.

I had a few ideas: things like turkeys and cougars and the reserved Yankee way I learned from my grandfather and his spinster sister, both of whom I shared a home with as a boy but never really got to know before they were gone. Also — who knew? — maybe I’d even jump off to replay parts of a conversation I had this week with an aged neighborhood Yankee, whose “Patch” with a catchy name easily remembered by a rhyme attracted strawberry pickers. Plus, I was dying to say goodbye to Matt Wolfe, the biomass huckster who’s long gone and hard to find, likely cooking up another scheme for a less sophisticated, less alert community that asks few questions.

I started by writing a new lead segueing into the paragraph I had written the previous day, then was just getting started — into the swing, so to speak — when my phone rang and the Caller ID indicated it was an unfamiliar local number. I took a chance and, lo and behold,  none other than the Wolfe-slayer herself, lovable activist Janet Sinclair, a peach of a lady who spearheaded sharp, organized opposition that sent the wily Wolfe a fleein’, tail tucked nervously between his furry legs. Sinclair was chatty, just wanted to talk and tell me she had hoped to see me at the previous night’s party in Turners Falls that drew a big crowd and lots of high-spirited chatter. She said she was taking the high road, had absolutely no need to dance over the pro-biomass corpses.

“We won,” she said. “I couldn’t be happier. But why be rude and obnoxious?”

Good for her, a class act. History will smile upon her mission.

Well, supper time is near, then work, so I must cut it off here. I hope I haven’t bored you. I must throw something together to eat before my wife returns from work. Maybe I’ll even get a chance to look at the new Rolling Stone magazine that arrived in the mail. Or I suppose I could briefly revisit Henry Miller, the artist America tried and failed to silence. Miller was cut from a different bolt of cloth, one with which I am familiar and fond of. I met the first man to publish Miller in America, a brave activist with a bedrock spine. I didn’t know Miller but can tell from reading him that he never shied away from a friendship out of fear that he’d fall in love, and laughed out loud at the Dead-Bird Society perpetuating the Christian myth that birds mate for life and live out their lives in lonely solitude when a mate dies.

I hope to discover something worth sharing in “The Books in My Life.” We’ll see. I’ve learned to be careful after reading a man like Miller. His defiant style can rub off on a reader of my ilk and spin him off into dangerous rants that irk the Chamber or Commerce and meeting-house flocks. But what the heck. I’ve turned 60 and am way past the point of caring what others think of my more unpopular views — an admission that would likely humor those who know me best.

Yeah, I suppose those folks, my true friends, would just crack a subtle smile and ask with a wry, affectionate chuckle and a glint of sarcasm in their eye, “What else is new?”

The patriotic summer holiday is here, flags proudly waving to passersby and, yes, my wheels are spinning out of control.

So let’s begin with those tall browning hayfields you’ve probably noticed in your travels. If they seem odd, well, they are — the result of prolonged wet weather we’ve endured, preventing what farmers call first cut, a hay harvest that should have occurred weeks ago under normal weather, which we haven’t had. Just the other day my brother-in-law, a retired professor enjoying an idyllic existence on his gentleman’s farm in Maine, said the month of June was the wettest on record since 1871. So, no Agnes, it’s not your haywire geriatric imagination, or dementia creeping in. It has been unusually wet. In fact, just today that familiar scent of summer mold gave me a sharp back-hander as I walked into my dining room. That’s what you get in an old house with extended humidity like this. Even with the bulkhead open wide, windows, too, at night with fans spinning, you can’t avoid that musty odor in downstairs rooms that aren’t air-conditioned. Which reminds me, I noticed something odd Wednesday morning on my daily walk with the dogs through Sunken Meadow. The Green River was flowing a filthy brown, rare indeed. Usually when roiled, it runs a thin milky green, tinted by fine gray clay particles from the watershed, thus its name, I suppose. Not so on overcast Wednesday morning, though. Hmmm? Can’t remember that color ever before. Don’t ask. No clue. Just one of them things, I guess: a mystery.

But back to the hayfields I have watched turn brown on daily rambles through chest-high cover with rambunctious dogs. Oh how the dogs love that tall, dense mix of orchard grass, red and white clover, tall timothy, and tiny white wildflowers standing high and straight, a combination which produced the subtlest, most pleasing aroma for weeks. Now some of the red-clover flowers have rotted to a drab dark brown, not what I’m used to seeing around my birthday. The light Great Plains brown you see from the road is matured orchard grass, which has gone by and lost most of its nutritional value (not to mention its healthy green hue), now ready to deposit seeds from drooping pods in the dense, moist air. Soon high pressure and a good stiff wind following bright, hot sun will send those seeds asunder to sprout anew. Meanwhile, the green timothy pods have formed and also stand erect and fertile, which I am not accustomed to seeing this time of year, when typically all fields have been scalped and regrowth is under way; same with the clover, which I also think of more as a summer grass. I assume both of these local fodders take longer to mature than the orchard-grass staple of first cut. This year the summer grasses will be mature for first cut, not what the doctor ordered for farmers, trust me.

On the other hand, the tall dense hayfields are great for wildlife and field birds, even turkeys. In fact, I’m surprised the dogs haven’t yet kicked out the doe and twin fawns I have seen signs of for weeks. I know they’re there, and they surely know we pass through daily yet know how to stay out of our way, their prints announcing they’re lurking. Sooner or later I’ll get a glimpse as I always do, hopefully before the lambs lose their spots.

I love bumping into little spotted fawns. Take for instance the buck that’s still roaming the Meadows. I have known his track for three years and crossed it often, having watched him grow from a suckling, spotted babe. Recently a colleague who owns an adjacent farm told me his father and uncle had been seeing a big deer near their barn. I told him it was almost certainly the buck I’ve been watching for three years, his track easily identifiable by its exaggerated splayed V that you can’t miss. The last I saw of that deer a couple weeks ago he was roaming with a yearling buck while the does they traveled with in winter and spring were tending their young in seclusion. A few days later, the man I call Big Boiczyk came to work excited to inform me he had seen the wide V track in his tilled croplands. It didn’t surprise me. I saw that deer as a 3- or 4-pointer two years ago, a 6- or 7-pointer last fall and expect it will sport eight or 10 points if he makes it to autumn this year. Will I kill him? No. If hungry? Yes. Though capable, I have nothing to prove, and won’t be drawn into that silly game of the insecure.

As for turkeys, well, as suspected, spring was a brutal nesting season. Maybe some people are seeing hens with poults. Not me. Down in the flatlands I’ve watched two hens, neither of which are with young. I saw those two birds often within a half-mile of each other on my daily travels; and I still see one of them regularly, every other day or so, feeding alone through a scalped, green hayfield and the infant cornfield t’other side the road. The other one down by the river is dead, killed by a predator. Finally, after watching my dogs roll in that bird’s feathery remains at two sites and carrying bits and pieces a short distance for more than a week, Chub-Chub and Lily finally swallowed the last wet feathers and legs with no ill effects I can detect. I’ve asked and there has been no sign of broods on the Big Boiczyk’s acreage, either. Just one of those years, I guess. But don’t toss and turn in your sleep over spring mortality. You can rest assured that there are more than enough turkeys around to sustain a healthy future flock. Who knows? Maybe the flock needed a year like this to thin it out a bit. Old Mother Nature has a way of managing her kingdom much more efficiently than human societies governed by corrupt leaders who do their best to disrupt just, natural order purely for selfish reasons.

That reminds me. What’s with all the white clover invading my yard, anyway? I don’t recall ever before seeing it. It’s everywhere, pervasive. Or is that invasive? Who cares? My wife mentioned it to me as something new, and since then my neighbor called and, unsolicited, mentioned to me that his lawn’s full of it. But it gets better. Perhaps the clover’s not just a neighborhood phenomenon. My aforementioned Maine brother-in-law lives six hours away and he has it too and new. Retired, learned and into such things in a big way, he has no explanation. My guess is that he soon will have a theory, though. Either that or maybe someone local will chime in. Could it have anything to do with the return of honey bees? Global warming? The rain? An occurrence last fall? Fukushima? The Gulf spill? I’d love to know, and apparently I’m not alone. Not that white clover’s a bad thing. I love it, vividly recall the school fields on both sides of my childhood South Deerfield homes filled with it, oh so fragrant. Foraging critters, wild and domestic, like it, too — turkeys and chickens, rabbits and deer. Mice, too, I discovered last week when I passed one chowing down while mowing the lawn along the wide opening into my barn’s cellar.

Before I go, a quick reflection from last week’s column about turning 60. After opining that I would have “grown up” sooner had I jilted softball in the 1980’s and early 90’s, I dreaded that I may have been insulting special people I met on the small diamond, folks whose friendship I greatly value. Well, at least some of them understood my point and didn’t take it personally. Among the myriad feedback I received was a heartfelt birthday card from the wife of a man I played softball against in Buckland, now retired and enjoying hilltown-farm nirvana, also an impromptu visit from another couple I met through softball, they delivering a book and two birthday cards. The visitors are sophisticated teachers, no less, another lot I don’t hesitate to publicly harangue. Apparently, they know my criticism is not aimed at them. How could they not? I once told the lady I wanted her to teach my grandchildren to read and write, and I meant it. That’s what she did — taught lucky kids to read and especially write. And now so does her longtime partner, a former college history professor and softball teammate of mine. They now work as a team, collaborating to teach teachers, a novel idea, at least the good ones who don’t know it all and are willing to listen.

Of course, I suspect that anyone who tried would have no trouble assembling a gang of my former teachers who’d identify me as a poor listener. All I can say in defense of myself is that even as a boy I think I had a good ear and knew who was and wasn’t worth listening to. Sadly, the latter far outnumbered the former and probably still do, a great reason I chose the autodidactic route I still travel.

I have an idea that my professorial visitors would understand, and so would my retired brother-in-law smartly living off the grid in Maine, himself a respected full professor for some 40 years. We often talk about education in front of a convivial holiday fire, and he in his gentle, diplomatic way bemoans the influx of adjunct professors and the demise of critical thinking on today’s campuses. Some praise these contemporary college programs and degrees as the path to unity and harmony, freedom and justice and success. Then again there are those like my friend Doc, who said out in my driveway before departing Sunday: “Don’t you know that thinkers are dangerous?”

Yes, I suppose, but in my mind not nearly as horrifying as the scarcity of thinkers preferred by corporate America and right-wing demagogues.

A young colleague I often tease with playful barbs beginning “Hey Curtis,” followed by some lighthearted quip, wore a grin as he handed me an old, yellowed, Recorder sports section Tuesday night and said, “Here, I thought you may want to look at this. I found it in Irmarie’s desk. Nice hat!”

He was referring to the mugshot topping my August 27, 1992 column headlined, “Right church, wrong pew.” I would have been 39 at the time, still young, so I was, of course, hesitant to read it, typical anytime old stories resurface. I guess I fear immature style, syntax that’s juvenile and undeveloped, and hope to avoid embarrassed shudders if I do choose to read it. In this case I did read and was OK with it. I was taking a swipe at a favorite old punching bag, Friends of Animals, whose spokespeople had proposed vasectomies for Chelmsford beavers polluting the town water supply. No fan of vasectomies or the overbearing ladies who demand them of their men (Horrors! They clip their babes and snip their men), I viewed the proposal as absurd, not to mention sexist, even potentially a violation of animal rights. That said, I offered a counter-proposal: lobotomies for the folks suggesting such a haywire remedy. I don’t recall that column drawing angry letters to the editor. Shocking! Friends of Animals are activists, you know, which only encourages me to go after them.

But enough of that, which, by chance, happened to be a perfect segue plopped onto my lap like a perfumed divorcee to cap the first draft of this, my last column before turning 60. Imagine that, me 60 come Sunday. Detractors from my wayward youth speculated I’d never see 60. Again, I get the last laugh. And here I sit, summer solstice in the rear-view, its spectacular waning full moon still lighting the night sky as I approach a milestone folks seem to dread along the bumpy, winding, rutted road called life. I suppose I could call the place I’m fearlessly skipping toward my final chapter, which I find not even itty-bitty frightening. But I can’t deny old age is closing in no matter how I twist it.

I remember turning 50 and telling my wife we’d be 60 before we knew what hit us, that time flies as you age. Now — Bingo! — we’re there, me two short years from the freedom of “retirement,” which promises to open a new chapter, my last, on my own terms, no authoritarian strings attached. I can only pray to my Earth Mother and bolt-of-lightning Dad for a little extension to stretch this last chapter longer in duration than the previous three. You never know. I have after all tempted the fates. But I do believe an active, inquisitive mind and fertile imagination can unleash the fountain of youth; also that the probability of finding such a warm, soothing geyser can only be enhanced by a little drop of youthful mischievousness clinging to a shallow, glimmering crevice at the base of your soul.

So what does it mean, this turning 60? Well, I guess it’s what you make of it. To me, retirement will mark the beginning, not the end of work. What promises to stop are the mindless, mundane chores most of us are forced to do for a paycheck, duties a hairy ape could perform, usually a waste of precious time. I’ve had enough of it, can’t wait to break free from the caged, dazed flock spinning the hamster wheel for self-adoring heroes of mirror worship. Soon I will never again have to answer whether under way is one word or two, because in my world it doesn’t matter. I understand it written as one or two words and accept both. Let the Associated Press lords of style grapple with that stuff at their annual Hilton conventions of self-importance and tipsy oral flatulence. I have no patience for such pedantic crap, and neither did the man who pushed me into this profession: late, great UMass professor Howard Ziff.

A former night editor at the Chicago Daily News, Ziff fled the newsroom to Amherst soon after witnessing the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention unfold before his eyes in Mayor Daley’s corrupt Windy City. Then, to make things worse, then got a splendid view of the misinformation deluge that hit the street in the form of mainstream press. Ziff, truly a visionary, had seen enough and wanted to share his wisdom with aspiring young scribes. Yes, back before CNN and the Internet, this daring, gruff, well-read, cartoon character of a professor named Ziff — a Holyoke native and Amherst College man — predicted AP Style would be the demise of newspapers because the typical reader was better educated than in the past and wanted a little pizazz. He implored that the future of news-writing was literary journalism championed by the likes of Dickens and Orwell, later Sixties “Rolling Stone” New Journalists like Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joe Eszterhas and Howard Kohn. He also had us read Joan Didion, Joe McGinnis, Thomas Agee and others, what he called “voices readers seek when trying to learn what really happened, because new readers are more sophisticated and want to be entertained with opinion and moxie.” I must have heard that advice a hundred times from Ziff, a devotee of storytelling news-writing style some call narrative.

Folded away in an old, red, tattered American Heritage Dictionary I’ve owned since college, I still have a half-page Ziff assignment slip from a “New Journalism” class I took, probably in 1973. The assignment reads, “In ‘Mau-Mauing the Flack Catcher,’ Tom Wolfe attempts to identify and define two social activities, mau-mauing and flak catching. What seem to you to be the characteristic terms he uses in making his definition? Do they seem adequate for the social activities he is trying to define? Does his activity leave anything out?” Classic Ziff: an assignment to activate the lost art of critical thinking in higher education; two pages, firm.

Before I move on, one more little Ziff anecdote. Soon after getting hired as a part-time Recorder sportswriter in the spring of 1979, I reconnected with my mentor and asked him to sponsor me in the  UMass “University Without Walls” program that rescued me. When I told him I was working at a newspaper and wanted to dovetail the job and some prior-learning activities into an independent degree plan, he gave me one of his priceless bemused looks, nose and right eye slightly wrinkled, and asked where I was working. When I answered “Greenfield Recorder,” he knew it, gave me a sheepish grin and imparted this advice: “Good place to start but you’ll never stay there. It’s an editors’ newspaper.” Well, wrong again, because here I sit, 35 years later, as an editor no less. What choice did I have? Franklin County’s my home. I had to find a niche or move somewhere I didn’t want to live.

Jumping back to the present, I cannot say I fear this final chapter I’m leaping into. No, in fact, I want to warmly embrace it like a dear old childhood friend or teammate. And please don’t expect from me that unimaginative claim we’ve all heard from wise old men who claim that, if they had it all to do over again knowing what they now know, they’d do it all different, much different, and better. Oh, really? How can that be? Because had we not lived the lives we lived, seen what we saw, and made the mistakes we made, then how in the world could we have learned what we know? I never understood that.

Though I never served on an altar, earned a merit badge or made an honor roll, I have always used my innate curiosity to learn what I need to know, figure it out without bowing and kneeling and saying, “Yes, Sir!” to arrogant bores who sing sweet tunes of self-promotion while speeding down the shiny rails of conformity. They can have that safe, tidy route. I have always preferred thin, overgrown trails leading off the beaten path and toward hidden truths. That is where my curiosity usually takes me, and it’s where I continue to uncover my most interesting data.

Looking back, I guess I was a boy till 20, a kid till 40, then a man, now an elder. The rest of the way, I hope to use my autodidactic, homespun perspective while peering in from the periphery as a seer and thinker, a reader and reactor and interpreter — a writer. How can it be anything but sad to realize that here in this tiny, provincial world of mine, my work will begin when I submit my final time slip. Topics are bubbling from my brain like a cool, refreshing spring trickling from black mossy ledge poking midriff through the steep, damp, shaded northern slope on a high forested ridge. The flow carves out a thin channel for clear thoughts, ideas and questions to escape through fern cover on the forest floor. These thoughts seek a larger stream leading to a secluded reservoir supporting large, colorful squaretails lurking deep in cold, dark summertime spring holes. There I will cast my bait, set the hook and bring to the surface with a loud splash wisdom borne from years of probing and pondering and combining it all into a way of life and thinking. I only hope to survive long enough to share this fruit ripened by decades of success and failure, agony and ecstasy, inner turmoil and torment and loss, serving it in a deep bowl at a festive harvest supper. Hopefully this last quarter of existence will bring a bonus and give me more than 20 years. The key is having something to live for, which I have, and it ain’t baseball or hunting or fishing or chasing fleeting hormonal urges and devilish lusts, pleasing indeed yet so deceitful and shallow. Been there, done that. New horizons keep an old man virile and, hopefully, interesting.

I pity those who found glory in youthful athletic arenas only to hit the wall as young men, forever burdened with a palpable void, one they cannot shake, forevermore lugging it to the tavern or ballpark, repeating the same tired tales ad infinitum. Retirement for them goes from swiveling barroom stool to supper table to La-Z-Boy recliner, beer in hand, to watch the ballgame and start snoring in the fifth inning. These people don’t understand a man like me, one who left it behind and moved on. Some are even critical because I don’t want to write about deer and turkey harvests, trout stocking and anadromous fish runs that I’ve covered repeatedly for 35 years. How long is too long? How many stories can you write about heroic hunters bagging 10-pointers from high tree stands in darkening woods? Who can read those stories, all similar, year after year, when only the names change? It gets old and tired and very boring fast if you’re worth your salt.

When activity on the local men’s softball diamonds faded out some 20 years ago, I wondered what I would do with myself, if I would miss the camaraderie between the foul lines, on the bench and during convivial post-tournament celebrations. Yet overnight I realized it would have been better had I stopped playing the first time I stepped away, after I blew out my knee in 1976 and knew in my heart I had lost too much to continue competing at a high level on the big diamond. But then old teammates and childhood friends lured me back to the little diamond for 10 or 12 more enjoyable years I now know I could have lived without. Not that I couldn’t compete. I could. But I had to swallow my pride limping around on a bum left knee that interfered with many important tasks which once came effortlessly, almost reflexive. Then, when I started reading and writing and exploring new subjects, I knew right away I had lingered too long in a dead-end kid’s game. I can’t say I brooded over that realization, just knew I should have pulled the softball plug before it started. Water over the dam.

So here I sit after more than 20 years of intensive reading and researching and exploring and trying to put it all together. I guess I’d describe my reading as an eclectic mix of literature, history and biography, plus nature, philosophy and political science with a little Indian spirituality thrown in. I’m at my best when assembling my own reading list, one book leading to another by perusing footnotes on the bottom of the page or at the back of the book along with bibliographies. Where such clues will lead, I never know, but it’s infectious and enlightening and dynamic, always something new to pique my curiosity and chase with vigor, often related to context and perspective pertaining to genealogy and personal identity. If you don’t know who you are, what do you know?

With formal work behind me, I fantasize about building a new daily routine, likely going to bed early and rising around dawn to pick up whatever I’m reading, maybe rewriting a piece I’m working on, or blowing out a first draft of something new while it’s still quiet, me fresh. Maybe I’ll unplug the tavern adventure I jumped into 15 years ago, say goodbye to part-time innkeeping and downsize in the hills where my dogs can run free and I can towel myself dry out on the deck. We’ll see. I’m getting a little ahead of myself but would be lying to say I haven’t entertained the concept of gathering my books and our best possessions, selling the rest of our assets and moving on to an easier place, off the grid, out of debt, free at last. A man can tire of the crazy capitalistic grind.

Lately, people have been telling me I ought to get a new photo taken to accompany this ancient weekly column, that I have taken on a new look with less weight, more hair and a grayer, more unruly goatee. Although I can’t deny that my appearance has changed or that I have considered inserting a new photo, let’s just say it’s not atop my priority list. Which reminds me, just the other day I bumped into a good old friend I haven’t seen for a while and he was quite surprised by my new look.

“Oh my God, Bags,” he chuckled, “I didn’t recognize you from a distance. You look great. How much weight have you lost? What? Are you, going back to the Sixties?”

I just slid back a devilish, half-cocked grin, looked him square and warmly in the face and told him, no, I never left.

Summer’s at the doorstep with my 60th birthday, late, great Mississippi John Hurt finger-picking and singing background blues as I sit here at my customary Wednesday station trying to come up with something. It won’t be difficult. I can feel it. But I really must discipline myself to stunt all those random thoughts flittering through my consciousness, perhaps the neighborhood too, as I moments ago sat drying off from a quick shower, hidden with a cup of strong black coffee behind dense, blooming mock-orange bushes along the sunny flagstone terrace.

The gray, soggy air has lifted and the windows and bulkhead are open, inviting dry, refreshing breezes inside to whisk stagnant dampness away to clear, sparkling-blue skies, clusters of white, billowy clouds floating by like ghostly cotton balls.

Is there a better time than the dawning of summer, when on my daily descent into Sunken Meadow I am greeted by that strong, uplifting scent of the sweet, wild white rose, so alluring and thought-provoking, the grayer and muggier the day, the stronger the aroma? For the past week, the overpowering scent has embraced me two steps through the open metal gate as I descend the double-rutted dirt road to the Green River’s edge. The pleasing scent bomb permeates the meadow as I skirt the brushy perimeter, dogs racing up and down Christmas-tree rows, in and out of narrow marshes, splashing through swollen beaver-pond overflows and across a thin purling channel that links them along the south end. Mother earth is happy and so are the dogs. Me, too, bowl of fresh native strawberries sweetening on the kitchen counter, a little maple syrup dribbled atop and mixed in, the bowl sealed tight with cling-wrap. My wife would tell me to refrigerate them. Not this week. She’s vacationing in Stowe, Vt. Can’t say I feel left out. I could have gone but am content at home. Plus dogs are unwelcome where she’s staying. Trust me, the berries won’t spoil. I intend to eat them.

Finally, a sign of spring fawns has appeared along my trodden path. First, a few days ago, I heard deer run away through the thick green tangle. Then, on Tuesday, I saw my first quarter-sized tracks, twins and their mom crossing where deer always cross, their tracks crisp in fine, damp silt deposited by that old hag Irene, who filled a small dip in the road where puddles used to form. Whenever I see tiny tracks like that, I think back to the ones I spotted years ago in adjacent highlands. I monitored those tiny hoof-prints for a few days before the field was hayed. Then, the day after the farmer scalped it brown, I was running the dogs and noticed Lily pawing and sniffing at something in the distance. When I whistled to her, she dropped her head to the ground, picked up her item of fascination and ran back to me with it. Sure enough, a little front leg from the elbow down, including a tiny little hoof that had left some of the prints I’d seen. No matter how careful farmers are to avoid killing newborn fawns during their first cut of hay, it’s unavoidable, as are many other forms of fawn mortality. Yet it appears that enough always survive to maintain a healthy herd.

The same can be said of many creatures hidden in the bucolic landscape. Every year I watch the bobolinks and many other field birds appear to build nests and lay eggs in waist-high hayfields only to be destroyed by humming, smoking, grinding farm equipment. Yet every year more birds and beasts return to those same fields to meet the same disruptive fates, so I must assume that in the end it all works itself out. Still, it makes you wonder what was the population of these creatures when there were no tractors or hay barns to fill? Who kept the populations in check then? How many is too many? How many is not enough? Sometimes it’s impossible to make sense of it all. Some just accept it as nature’s mysteries; others turn to churches and preachers for enlightenment. Count me among the former.

Which brings me to a hen turkey I’ve been watching in nature’s chapel since the beginning of May? Lily was the first to find her, then Chubby several times. I once even flushed that bird myself from close quarters when the dogs were off on other splashy, brush-busting nearby adventures. That bird’s flush some 10 feet away startled me like many a partridge has,  then quickly disappeared through a small marshland gap. The last two times I saw that hen, Chubby flushed her from tall weeds and got right on top of her before she flushed, indicating to me that she was probably protecting a nest. After those two disruptions, I quickly called the dogs off in case little ones were near. Those potential conflicts sidestepped, I soon became concerned about the extended soaking rains of the past two weeks, knowing that saturated hatchlings would be wiped out by pneumonia brought on by the cold that had people burning wood stoves in June.

Well, truth be told, none of the above contributed to that hen’s demise — not me, my dogs or the farm equipment’s lethal blades. No, something else got her, probably a coyote or fox, fisher or bobcat or who knows what. All I know is that on Wednesday morning, not far from a spot where Chubby flushed that hen a week or two ago, he picked up the wing of a freshly killed adult turkey and came running proudly to me with it held high and firm in his mouth. Without coaxing, he just dropped it on the farm road, left it there and ran into the riverside woods hunting for a new fascination, obviously much more interested in that bird alive than dead. If that hen was with poults, they too have vanished, just a few more of nature’s many victims.

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, or even if there is one. I guess just that there’s no telling how the end will come for any of us. We’re here today, gone tomorrow. Not a thing we can do about it.

Not only that but, it’s always possible to escape one form of violent death only to invite another that’s even worse.

That’s life.