In Pursuit of Wonder

April 26 I needed quiet time, nature time, I needed to go to the woods for peace, perspective and healing. I walked through the yard, pass the sheds, turned left, following the fence line, and pass the pond, up the hill, through the rested pasture to the woods and prairie.…

After spending several minutes enjoying the view, we continued on a trail that went along the bluff ridge. A few people had gone down that trail, but soon came back. Jesse asked a couple if the trail ended shortly after the overlook. The woman said it did, or at least…

We wanted to go somewhere, do something other than just sleep away a beautiful Sunday afternoon. We thought about going to Whitewater State Park, one of our favorite places. We had wanted to go to Whitewater to hike as soon as the snow melted, but we still hadn’t gone. Instead,…

Though I’m often not going to the woods or out “in the wild”, I’m still daily outside enjoying the natural world. For although a garden is domestic, in a sense it retains a wildness, an organic garden anyway. There is a great amount of biodiversity going on, and I take…

I stood underneath its canopy, looking up at the large, heart shaped leaves. I marveled at the sunlight shining through the leaves themselves, illuminating most the leaf but darkening some spots, an awesome effect that is only possible in the spring while leaves are young. The tree didn’t seem very…

May 3, 2015 I was nervous, stomach all in knots. For encouragement, I opened The Beekeeper’s Bible to the page on foulbrood. European foulbrood is caused by Melissococcus plutonius, a non-spore forming bacterium, which starves the larva to death by competing for food. Since the bacterium doesn’t have spores it…

I was going mushroom hunting, looking for dryads though a few morels would be delightful, I didn’t think I’d find any or at best only a couple. To save some time (I had only an hour and a half before I had to get back to make cheese), I took…

The western chorus frog, Pseudacris triseriata, is a very small frog, barely over an inch long; males are slightly smaller than females. This is Minnesota’s smallest frog. Skin color is variable, ranging from green, gray red or light brown. It has three, dark longitudinal stripes on its back, which are…

Mom, Elisa (my niece) and I went to the National Wildlife Refuge by Minnesota City to view migrating waterfowl. Traveling on an unmaintained road, we drove slowly, watching the water. At the water’s edge, the first bird we saw was a sandhill crane; this trip was planned in hopes of…

There were many special places on my childhood farm that I loved. One spot that I liked to go to on a warm, sunny day was in one of the pastures. On a side of a hill the ground dips down a little, slopping with the hill, deep enough that…