Playgrounds and Treasure Pockets

I hesitate to write here with authentic claims about the wild world, when the wildest I usually get is the playground down the street. But we're here again today, back on home ground, my little daughter smiling up at me in her pumpkin hat, celestial jacket, and duck boots (how she loves those boots!) as …

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Woods-Walking on Two and Four Legs

I'd been feeling those last-day-of-vacation blues, at the end of a glorious trip home: a week of tent sleeping and garden picking, of gramma and grandpa (mom and dad) and their culinary tricks, of lakeside sand castles and car adventures---all soul-manna for this begrudging city kid and her kid. But we were set to leave …

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Midsummer in Van Cortlandt Forest

If there's something I'd like to believe, and also to teach all our daughters, it's that you have got to love your home country. Yearn for others at will, lament your distance from past lovers (aspen and mountains), identify yourself more closely with life-chapters past. Fine. Still, get out there on your own backyard trails. Learn …

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Loving the garden too

Here is the Native Plant garden: a terraced pool with geometric cascades; a wet hot corridor of mountain laurel and rhododendron; a bird-bath pond, frequented just as often by turtles and frogs. Pollinators feasting on a rainbow of stalks and sundials. Hawks in flight overhead or perched in the neighboring woods. Squirrels, black and slender, skittering …

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Coyote Lovely

It starts like this: Nonna and I were walking the baby to a different playground from our usual, when we spotted a statue I'd seen before but never investigated. I went in for a closer look. I thought it might be Balto, a hero dog who already has one stony likeness in Central Park. But …

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