Home Work

Although the title of this blog* bows to the influence of the urban, my efforts skew toward accounts of the wild. This is by design, since the preoccupations of everyday life have a way of steering our attention toward human (aka urban, in my scheme of things) concerns: social interactions, commerce, politics, and all the…

The Late Winter Rant

The view outside has become tiresome.

I don’t think I’m supposed to say that. I’m not a fundamentalist, but I’ve steeped myself in a tradition of natural history that holds the world as sublime: a wellspring of solace and inspiration and revitalization, source of and target for gratitude.

Such qualities are sorely needed these days, and so I started writing a post on the theme weeks ago. The rough start I made framed a dissonance between the constructed world of news and current events (the “urban” of this site’s title) and the unbuilt environment of ridgelines and woods and grasslands (the “wild” outside my door).

Winter Pasture

There’s a distinct pleasure in being able to make someone else happy. Sometimes their pleasure persists even as your own memories of the effort involved in said happy-making fade, tipping the scales of your satisfaction even further toward the positive. In the spring of 2018, almost a year ago now, I was getting started on…

Kindling the Fire

As chores go, I quite like chopping kindling. So many household tasks are unpleasant to do, even if they’re wonderful to have done. The actual chopping of kindling verges on the pleasurable, though…provided I’m not fulfilling the duty on a just-in-time schedule. On chilly afternoons when I open the wood drawer to discover that I’m…

Pink Time

The view never gets old. In winter, the straw-colored grasslands dotted with evergreen-dark have an understated, action-suspended aspect. Snowstorms change things up now and again, padding the view as if packaging it for shipment. The white expanses and mounds, throwing shadows of bluish-gray, are pretty, and I love watching the slow-motion changes as snowmelt re-paints…

Wraparound

I’m not a morning person. Never have been. Cloud bank south of Pikes Peak. I like to sleep, for one thing, and, as is the case with some other aspects of my life as time goes on, I don’t do it as well as I used to. I dislike getting up in the dark. Part…