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 …

Continue reading Coyote Lovely

My Mother (the Skunk Cabbage.)

To every wild feminine spirit in love with the words and the woods: Happy Mother’s Day. Through our gifts of transcending and caring and loving, we are all of us mothers. “A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn’t end until she creates a home where all of …

Continue reading My Mother (the Skunk Cabbage.)

Moon, moon, moon

Here is an image I love: Nonna’s kitchen with the lights off, baby at the window in her grandmother’s arms. Two heads dear to me turned away, looking up and out at a clear night sky. Guarda la luna! exclaims Nonna. Mon! squeals her laughing grandbaby. Then again in our home: my husband heaves our …

Continue reading Moon, moon, moon

The lightness of being (on a Genova beach)

Pen, be my heart: for these two wave-thundering fingers of golden-blue before that sun hits these rocks--in Genova, friend and lover, a city where nothing is not wild. Genova, where all ties and times and turns itself to the sea, and thus to the moon, that pulling, reflecting body... I am here on the spiaggia …

Continue reading The lightness of being (on a Genova beach)

Wild New York: Discoveries for the New Year

Hello reader, page, screen, blog, new year. Hello, wintery intermezzo, and hello longer nights, hours spent indoors, learning and storing, contemplating. Hello bookshelf, and hello resolution… I resolved this winter to further a blossoming interest in my home ground, in the water and soil that surrounds. This attention to New York’s wildness and natural history …

Continue reading Wild New York: Discoveries for the New Year