Every Good Morning

You Can Listen Here Saturday, June 17, 1815:  Precisely two hundred year ago today, on a cold, wet morning, Martha Deacon, nine months pregnant, “wandered with three small children through the [British] army’s bivouacs”* in the village of Genappe, very close to the Belgian hamlet of Waterloo. She was searching for her husband, Thomas Deacon, an Ensign in the 73rd Highland Battalion. Going into battle at the crossroads of Quatre-Bras, he had left her […]

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You Can Listen Here One crow, the same crow, marked by a gap in his left wing, appears alone in the early morning and shows me the trick he has taught himself. Without any lookout from his extended family, risking the Cooper who hunts this turf, he bobs and weaves across the lawn until he is under the caged suet. He looks up. He rises to the cage in less than a blink, effortlessly, […]

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You Can Listen Here   I have lived in the country long enough to know the sound. The clattering at my back told me what was coming. An air-conditioned tractor, toxic green,12 feet high, drawing a harrow, its blades dusty and sharp. After it passed, I stepped into the road and watched it turn to the fields. I heard the harrow drop and the scraping, rock-cracking cutting begin. For five hours it made pass […]

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You Can Listen Here Next door, twenty four and one-half acres went up for sale over a year ago; the fields have not been sprayed with herbicides or insecticides for 25 months. After being planted in corn five years in a row, they have lain fallow, and now are coming back, the monoculture defunct and life by the battalion gone rampant. Two springs have brought forth these plants: Wild Heath Aster — our great grandmothers and aunts when […]

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