Boxes
I spent the Labor Day weekend sorting through cardboard coffins—a.k.a., Bankers Boxes—crammed with my “papers.” Once upon a time, these sheets were bright with blankness. Then I saw fit to deface them with my...
Author: John P. O'Grady
Ursine Feast
What until the night before had been an old stump at the edge of the yard, now a gaping pit (“tip” spelled backwards) left by a hungry bear. No more carpenter ants here. Full...
Poet Bling
One time, Bernadette, Phil, and I were going to an art event in Saratoga Springs. The two of them, of course, are poets and looked like it. I look like something else and was...
How Sustainable is the Idea of Sustainability?
[The following essay was written in 2002. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”] Having gone through a forestry education back in the 1970s, and being a skeptic by nature when...
Living Landscape – A 1997 Interview with Gary Snyder
In October 1997, I interviewed the poet Gary Snyder. The subject of our discussion was the influence the American West and its literature has had on him and on his work. Over the course...
The Goodie Life
I had just put my head on the pillow. Nap time. Or rather, that was my intention. But barking happens. The ten-month-old Collie Puppy started barking, a funny little bark, right next to the...
Softly Slippered Animal Spirits
In recent months, I have been engaged in some collaborative house-sitting at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s House in Hartford, Connecticut. Harriet herself is on extended vacation. She occasionally drops us a line from afar, in...
Trees & Thoughts
A few years after publishing her most famous work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a brief essay celebrating a magnificent old oak tree she was fond of. She mused: “I sometimes...
Mary Earley’s Dark Angels
“I am always close to this.” –Dongshan The artist Mary Earley has become an elusive figure in the history of art. No surprise there. Oblivion is hardly an unexpected fate for an artist or...
Lester Rowntree: Vernacular Natural Historian
“As I settle down, relearning how to live the well-rounded life, I begin to perceive that the tame, as well as the wild, has its place when it comes to collecting myself.” So wrote...