The raw ingredients of a simple, overwhelmingly delicious and seasonal spring dinner last week: asparagus, morel mushrooms, and ramps (or wild leeks, which have a delicate, indescribably oniony taste), with perhaps a few cherry tomatoes in for color. Chop and sautee them in butter, lemon juice, and white wine (or verjus blanc), then spoon over […]
Read moreI spent the middle of May — just after classes ended, even before turning in my grades — in a fever of garden work, reclaiming a quackgrass-infested lily bed and moving and spreading a giant pile of mulch and constructing a long-dreamed-of raised bed by hand. All of this I did by myself, in one […]
Read moreComing out of my office late this afternoon, I spotted a barred owl up in a tree outside the building, hunched against the trunk, squinching his eyes against the light and stoically standing off a pair of crows who were hassling him. I got concerned, especially when he was still there at dark a couple […]
Read moreWhat is it about a swimming animal that is just so endlessly delightful? Don’t know. But biking past the sloughs down near the river yesterday — yes, I did spend the first real sunny afternoon of spring up in the office, grading — I spotted the twin arrows of paddling-muskrat-wakes, heading away. They spotted me […]
Read moreBlustery raw wind, gray sky, cold. But I’m glad, because it’s raining. Not snowing. Raining. All the gutters and downspouts are trickling, cutting channels through the grungy continents of ice now going soft and grainy everywhere. Dark and muscular, our river fills its bed from bank to bank, rumbling under the bridge and carrying melted […]
Read more“Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be ‘uneconomic,’ you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.” — E.F. Schumacher, Small Is […]
Read more“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.” – Victor Frankenstein to Robert Walton, Frankenstein; […]
Read moreHe dressed himself in camoflage. Amid the wordless shock and horror and grief, that’s a detail that sticks. He dressed himself in camoflage and gathered his weapons — including Sig Sauer and Glock handguns and a Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine, purchased legally — and went to an elementary school. There he killed twenty children under […]
Read moreBlack as in Iowa soil, that is — its first couple inches just touched with frost, covering golden potatoes underneath. The cold came at last, the day after Thanksgiving in this unusually warm fall. Time to harvest everything that was left in the garden — carrots, potatoes, collards, beets — before the ground freezes for […]
Read moreToday a friend of mine, an African-American woman and PhD candidate, writes: “I tested a subject today whose very existence is the opposite of mine. He is an older (near octogenarian), White Republican, and I am…not. But during the session, we spoke respectfully of our political differences. Though there were the inevitable moments of awkward […]
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