Pockets Full of Secret Treasures

Anyone who has ever raved about the baby gear storage capacity beneath any given stroller is lying. Or maybe their child isn’t yet old enough to hop in and out of the stroller on the ride, repeatedly tossing found items into that storage space. Or maybe they’re simply taking walks in barren parking lots.

Either way, in my experience, that space is mainly good for one thing: leaves, feathers, sticks, and rocks — and don’t think about stuffing even a jacket in on top of those goodies, lest it accidentally damage a leaf. This isn’t limited to strollers, of course. Essentially any outdoor kids’ ride-on item is likely to be filled with the loot of the day’s walk (and maybe of the day’s before that, and the day’s before that. Oops.)

Leaves from this year? Last year? Who knows!

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Reading for When the World Is on Fire

Smoke-filled skies around Twisp, WA, in late July 2015, as part of what would become the Chelan Complex fire.

These are not easy days to read the news, or listen to it, or think about it. As I heard one radio reporter say yesterday, “It seems the whole world is on fire right now.” Indeed.

In the past week, three articles have stayed with me as I’ve gone about my days. Here’s why.

I have watched with some interest over the past four years or so, but particularly the past one or two, the manner and degree to which climate change appears on the front page. Plenty of others have been watching the same thing, some of them analyzing references to keywords like oil, or fossil fuels, or human involvement (and far too often the lack of those references). I watch and I wonder when hope gives up the ghost. When the last line of “But there is still time” turns into something else. And I feel that to some small extent, we’ve reached that point. Perhaps not that doom is written in stone, but that something is, or at least that there is widespread acknowledgment that the consequences of climate change aren’t waiting in some far-off future but are here, now.

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Read and Explore at The Naturalist’s Notebook

The West Coast is on fire. Endangered species’ habitats are facing ruin. We have turned to the Greek alphabet to name new tropical storms and hurricanes. It is not a time for the faint of heart when it comes to perusing news about nature.

Some days, then, it feels increasingly important to acknowledge the beauty and whimsy in the world, for it is a good reminder as to why we push forward through it all. And lately, puffins keep capturing my attention, thanks to one online source that provides a glimpse into the world beyond headlines of despair (though you will certainly see photos of California on fire). I have been so happy to stumble upon a number of puffin photos this month that I decided I needed to post about The Naturalist’s Notebook.

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Fall into Reading with Leaves, by David Ezra Stein

If I were so inclined, I think I could create a collection of nature-inspired children’s books that no one in my house would read but me. The trouble with some such books is that they lack any plotline that might keeps kids interested over a period of time. They might have lovely language, delightful images, or interesting information, but I think even those that have all three qualities can grow repetitive in their basic enumeration-of-things-that-move-about-the-woods narrative.

In more than a few cases, the art is the main draw (ha ha), the prose lacking. I have, for example, a book beautifully illustrated with cut paper, but the language is ho-hum. Still, for some reason, as long as perhaps two of the qualities mentioned earlier are reasonably well met, I can’t get enough of outdoorsy picture books. Today’s feature is a fun read for little ones as we enter the fall season.

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Wild Geese, Autumn’s Emblem

In the village store, someone says, “I heard the geese go over,” and there is a moment of silence. Why this is so moving, I do not know. But all of us feel it.

Gladys Taber

Several weeks ago, as I turned to walk inside, I caught sight of a low flock of geese, honking, their wings golden, lit underneath with the glow of the setting sun as they flew southwest. It was arguably the most spectacular geese sighting I’ve ever had, a pristine moment in the midst of an ordinary week’s chaos.

My relationship with geese is hot and cold, a love/hate dynamic that extends as far back as I can remember geese. Majestic overhead, cranky on the ground; yellow fuzzballs that turn into hulking bodies whose unwieldy appearance is deceptive once you see them in flight. I recall watching “Fly Away Home” as the post-wisdom-tooth-removal pain medication wore off shortly before Thanksgiving my senior year of high school. I have distinct memories of playing hopscotch along any path of my New England college campus as I tried to dodge their goose-y droppings. When I take my daughter to “feed the ducks,” often we are actually tossing park-provided pellets to a gaggle of geese, a few ducks mixed in if we’re lucky.

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