Introduction

A few years ago, I'd started another blog on a platform whose workings I just could not understand or work around. After awhile, I got very frustrated with it, and just abandoned it. But I have always wanted to start another one through which I could share my weekly newspaper columns with individuals who don't have access to that publication--the Journal Tribune. Unfortunately, online readers no longer have the option of reading the JT without first purchasing a subscription. So using it as a reference for my work is pretty much useless if interested parties can't get to them to read them. So that's the point of this blog--to get those essays out there--all four years' worth of them, not so much for the oohs and aahs they might generate, but more to keep people connected to nature, where it all began.
 




And that's why I started writing those articles in the first place--to honor nature by keeping her alive in the hearts and minds of as many people as I could reach with them. I think I've done that, judging by some of the emails of support I've gotten since I submitted the first ones back in the fall of 2010. It will take awhile to get them uploaded to this blog, but I will attempt to start from the beginning, and list the essays by season, which is how I have them filed away on my desk-top.






I hope they are as relevant now as when I first wrote them, but I suspect they will be. Because nature, and whatever we can say about her, is nothing if not always relevant and as much a part of our lives now as she has ever been.


Note to the reader: When I began writing these essays, I was living in a spot that was the realization of a life-long dream for me...an old mobile home on a small hill tucked into the woods of Lyman, Maine, near Swan Pond. I was to live there for 13 years before circumstances compelled me (foolishly, as I have come to realize) to sell it and move to what I hoped would be an easier lifestyle fraught with fewer worries. In so doing, however, I sacrificed the peace, beauty and serenity that I had so long cherished, and I ended up in a place smack-dab in the heart of a small busy town that was totally out of character for me. Now here I am back in Lyman, Maine, living in an apartment overlooking Wadleigh Pond. And while I have not reclaimed my sense of ownership, I have reacquired here much of the serenity and autonomy that I had in my own place. Ironically, I am just several miles from there, a fact which caused me some grief in the beginning. But I've come to love this place and to renew my special relationship with nature that I never truly abandoned.


While I composed these essays from three separate locations over the last four years, they all have one thing in common--words that sprang from my heart--one that was never at any moment very far from home.


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