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Another thought from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez:The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.

Monotropa uniflora grows all around our cottage. It lacks chlorophyll and is parasitic on fungi, which in turn take nutrients from tree roots, so it ( Read more... )

This photo appears as sidebar to a recent post in The Yarn about this wildflower. I thought the blue-eyed grass in my rock garden had finished flowering, but today is a new sunny day, and a fresh ring of flowers opened this morning, so I wasted no time in recording it. The plant has bloomed steadily since I brought it from a garden centre a month ( Read more... )

There is hardly a place and time in Ontario more beautiful than a September meadow. The past few weeks have been wired with worries about work and money, but these roadside treasures caught my eye on the way home this afternoon. All I needed was eyesight to make me wealthy, and the camera made me a philanthropist.

It reminded me of the country ( Read more... )

Les went on a service call, so I spent most of the day alone in the shop, racking the mixture for Drayton. Most organ pipes, at least the smaller ones, are held in place by rackboards over the windchests, which deliver air to the pipes. A hole must be drilled and filed to the exact size of each pipe.

Most organ stops contain only one set (or rank) ( Read more... )

For the second winter in a row, mice launched an all-out war on the cottage. Last year my sister-in-law found the mess and had a fit, but Mom said, "Mice are a fact of cottage life. No use getting exciting about it." But cleaning up was a big job. We had to clear cupboards, clean them, and haul linens and towels to the laundromat in Huntsville. My ( Read more... )

Besides the friends I went to see, the one thing I wanted to do on the trip was see the Great Smoky Mountains. Years ago I had driven the Blue Ridge Parkway through Virginia, but never ventured as far south as the Smokies.

The second day I spent in Knoxville, Jason had to take his ESL class on a field trip, so he invited me along. Our destination ( Read more... )

The schedule designates Fridays as my official day off writing the novel. Those afternoons will be adventure times. I intend to head out of town with my camera to explore nature and the countryside. What a blessing it is to have a car at my disposal for my own purposes again.

Last Friday I stopped at Canadian Tire to pick up an Ontario Road Atlas: ( Read more... )

I'm supposed to be doing something else, but....

I'm trying to go headfirst into feelings, not push them away. Having dismantled the structure of habit, particularly those meaningless entertainments that typically fill my quiet weeknights at home, I encounter boredom.

And under the scratched surface of boredom, barely but carefully covered, ( Read more... )