New strays seem to spontaneously generate on my patio, replacing the old ones as soon as me and my neighbor, Jill, find homes for them. Jill and I both feed them. Two males, a scruffy long-haired black cat and a tiger-striped American short-hair, a clone of my old male, have teamed up. But the stray […]
Essays
The Absence of Man
“The greatest joy in nature is the absence of man.”
-William Bliss Carman-
Every time I hike along the shoulder of a mountain or even just walk in a local forest preserve outside Chicago, I recover a part of myself. I gain a fragment of my self that I had lost to civilization. In the world made […]
Sister
It was a chilly May Sunday, the first one in May, as a matter of fact. May in northern Illinois offers a multiple personality of seasonality. May can’t seem to make up its mind about what it wants to be. It’s a moody month of near freezing nights followed by 85 degree days. No, the […]
The Night Wind’s Lover
I dream about these vacant places. I lull myself to sleep with imaginings of desert solitude when I’m cooped up back in my Chicago rowhouse. Desolation, dark winds are my fantasies, always alone. I drive over a thousand miles to be alone. I pack gear and read survival books and study maps, so I can […]
The Stare
The Midwestern autumn carried the warmth of the summer in its days. Two days before Thanksgiving, the temperature held to 50 in the daytime. This night, I arrived home from work at half-past midnight. The little, townhome village within the giant city I lived in slept along with that city, windows dark and doors locked. […]
The Miraculosity of Ice
There’s a school of thought out there that holds miracles as ordinary happenings rather than the extraordinary material of a special people chosen by God, written down in a hoary text.
Today stands as the last day of the Year of our Lord, 2004, and I suppose it is a miracle that the mercury cloys out […]
In the Shadow of the Outhouse
I made it all the way down (4.8 miles) from the trailhead at Murphy Point to the White Rim Road. It was high desert heat in July, and I descended 1,100 feet down a bench of Wingate Sandstone. Once I flattened out, I followed the Hogback the rest of the way. The White Rim sandstone […]
Bird Bath
You ever feel like running your car over someone’s face?
This particular Saturday felt with its cold gray clipper blowing in off Lake Michigan like the first real day of winter, even though a month of days stood between now and its official start. In the Windy City, this weekend before Thanksgiving, when the sky wouldn’t […]
Four Feral Felines – How Adopting Wild Kittens Gave Me PTSD
It was late summer, Y2K. A shabby B & W female, a stray, loitered in my back yard. Sometimes I feed the strays, especially in winter. More often, my neighbor Jill, a lusty, wig-toting woman with a feline way, nourishes them. She harbors five cats in her carpetless home, kind of like a cat half-way […]
Seed
In the forest in late spring, on the flood plain along the river languid running, a backwater from the main channel, blanketed with a blizzard of cotton seeds that shown as crystals in the shafts of sunrise. The seeds skated like water skippers on the temporary pond.
Along the main channel of the river, the seeds […]