I took a kid fishing recently. A friend’s kid – a ten-year-old boy who didn’t grow up rural. We cast rooster tails and panther martins into a tea-colored lake that sat up on the…

It’s mid-May as I write this, on an evening that feels like the transition between spring and summer. Outside, the soggy air smells like dead worms and hyacinth and freshly split birch. The…

Judged by the contents of its clutter, my desk is not a particularly happy place. You can picture my computer monitor gasping for air amidst a pile of papers that amount to a sea of bad news.…

By the time you read this, summer will have long ago become a fish story - just a memory in a Polaroid that was “this hot” (spread your arms apart) and went by “this…

The ancient Celts spoke of “thin places” in nature – places where the veil between heaven and earth is worn thin. To those with Thomas Cole taste, “thin” could be…

I grew up in a rural Vermont town, the son of a forester and a public school teacher. The Vermont part’s not important, but the rural part is. Stories around the Thanksgiving dinner…

My wife recently came across a very interesting family document, an official inventory of the estate of her great-great-grandfather, Robert McCrillis, who died in 1884 in Topsham, Vermont.…

“This time they got caught” was the distinct overtone in a recent news story in which 15 illegal immigrants from China who had packed themselves into a crate were found just in the nick of…

Because of the way our nation was born and grew, we tend to think of land as an infinite resource. Most of us have ancestors who left an Old World where only the wealthy owned land. When they…

One of the great pleasures of wandering in the undeveloped woodland in our area is finding cellar holes, barn foundations, and all kinds of old fences, and imagining what a particular place…