Every Good Morning

The death of birds feels like the end. I do not know another way to put it. I cannot muster any optimism. Let me quote at length: “ A new study , which analyzed decades of data on North American birds, estimates that the continent’s bird populations have fallen by 29 percent since 1970. That’s almost 3 billion fewer individuals than there used to be, five decades ago. “It’s a staggering result,” says […]

Three toads in a few hours — three of anything alive other than ticks and mosquitoes is good, but three fat toads makes me happy. It shows our yard is clean, insects plentiful, the blades on my mower set high enough. One lurched out of a pile of rocks dumped in the driveway, another from garden dirt I was moving, another from high grass I was poking through before mowing. […]

Each Tuesday with children I become myself multiplied, and yet my attention becomes neither scattered nor diluted. It occupies layered frames of reference, as it did in the classroom. Those layers, each, intensely, gather impressions of the faces of both mothers and children, their gestures, emotions, emotions masking other emotions, levels of attentiveness, their crackling show of personalities, and over time, of character, as it has set and as it […]

Even when I dream of solitude, I know I cannot endure it. I imagine some cabin near Katahdin, the two of us deep in January at the end of a road, daylight at 8, lights on at 3, silence all day, feeding a fire in the stove all day, the phones useless, just books and walks and the existence of winter bears. Then the crazy would set in. I’m the […]