On the anatomy of a phrase and the history baked into it.
Joined07.28.16
Articles23
Franklin Burroughs is the author of Billy Watson’s Croker Sack, The River Home, and Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay, which won the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing.
The legacies of my generation, individual and collective, will be various: much to boast about and much to be ashamed of.
Early last April, a pair of ospreys — newlyweds, so to speak — built themselves a nest there. Every so often, we’d see one or the other of them...
"Rare birds, high-value birds, please us. But no more than the cliff swallows that once arrived in abundance every spring."
Up North, in the true canoe country, early May is to canoe-tripping what Thanksgiving to Christmas is to retailing. The whole year quickens toward those two weeks.
New England Elms, long cherished as ornaments, became symbols, providing more than simply shade.
"As you get older, those seasons accelerate, arriving and departing like houseguests — hardly time to clean up after one before the next one is on the doorstep."
This November’s midterm elections pit us against each other in ways that seem to have precious little to do with realities grounded in our local and national geographies or their histories.
Those rivers, those woods, those creatures, that country: The Way Life Is.
By 1900, the following animals were extinct or nearly extinct in Maine and everywhere else east of the Mississippi: 1) any wild canid larger than a fox, 2) wild turkeys, 3) beavers. Now they act like they own the place.
Seems like yesterday: everything sharply detailed and in focus, more vivid now in memory than it was then in fact.
The house you sit in and the ground you stand on are liquid assets. We hold a lease on life itself and on every other thing we think we own.