“It is, for me, a kind of prayer. Digging in the soil, mixing with my hands old, dead, and depleted soil with new, dark and saturated, enriched with compost soil. It is so…

“I still have a number of keepsakes of her, my feminine me. When I open myself to being vulnerable and discover it’s not as awful as I’ve been told for most of my…

“Otto’s name for the corner of the basement where my desk is located was the German ‘Kabuff,’ but that word implies a dark, dusty studio, and my stateside kabuff is ‘a clean, well-lighted…

“On that day that now seems so long ago, I watched as Republicans and Democrats rose to sing Carter’s praises (among them the sons of former president Gerald Ford and former VP Walter…

“Recently, a young horticulturist said to me, ‘Y’all (meaning older horticulturists) focused on pretty flowers and pretty gardens. It’s time to think about plants that do more. Time to give native plants an…

“Mornings now are full of robins, some high in the weeping birch where they glow in the sunrise, others in the shadowed backyard oak, but most of them hidden in the big spruce…

“From where I sit, the water comes into sight up by the big midstream rock, swamper of canoes. It tumbles out of a long, boulder strewn riffle, piles up in a big eddy…

“Before a bulldozer came to flatten/the house, neighbors knew it would happen, looked/out from their late poker games and pool cues,/lifted bottles to the past, when we were/still alive, not quite in our…

“Claire Bateman, the dark-haired American woman of a certain age who sometimes sits across from me discussing current events and the state of the union bears no resemblance at all to the universe-sized,…

“The skies here in the extreme south of our planet are different from those anywhere else I have ever seen. There is something unaccountably vivid and luminous about the atmosphere, as if we…