This is a chipmunk hole. There are several here, dotting the top and sides of the smallest garden bed nearest to the house. It makes sense since the ground is high and the soil is dry and well draining, while the rest of the property is too boggy and wet for burrows.
The good news is it looks like we will be able to extend our stay in this place until 2023, which means we can do some gardening here this growing season.
Today is the publication day for Grow Curious: A Journal to Cultivate Wonder in Your Garden and Beyond. This book is not simply a journal with nice ideas and pretty pictures. It is a treatise on how to cultivate relationship, connection and belonging with plants, land, nature, and ourselves.
Those of you who follow my art making account on Instagram will notice I haven’t done any encaustic in a while. Unfortunately, my health has plummeted, again, as it does every year around this time, and encaustic work requires a certain baseline amount of energy that I don’t have. I’ve had to adjust to art forms that are doable from bed. Encaustic is definitely not one of them!
I always seemed to be in the car when he got the inkling to score some weed. “Wait here a minute. I just gotta see a friend.” I think we were at odds about the real length of a minute because even factoring in kid standards, I know it was a lot more than that. It was often cold in the car and scary. I sat on edge, half expecting to be kidnapped or killed. “Here” was always some behind the...
I’m disabled. I know I’ve used the word before, but there’s still much resistance, the result of an internalized ableism that I’m still trying to disentangle from 6.5 years in. I resist because I know that culturally, societally, my value has diminished and using the word feels like handing over a weapon to use against me.
I’m pleased to announce that my 6th book, Grow Curious: A Journal to Cultivate Wonder in Your Garden, is now available for pre-order and will be published February 1, 2022 with Chronicle Books.
I’ve been thinking about my stepfather a lot lately. It’s been hard not to since we moved out of the city and to a small town in Niagara. He worked for the canal. We live right by it now, drive past it regularly, and sometimes hear the ships from our home as they make their way up and down the escarpment from one Great Lake to another.
Earlier this evening, while slow drying a batch of our own homegrown tomatoes in the oven, Davin made a joke about the drying process to the tune of Rush’s “Closer to the Heart.” I’ve tried to replace it with “Subdivisions” (a superior song), but it refuses to come unstuck.
This is a list of the books I have read, am currently reading, or plan to read for what I have often referred to as my Self-Directed Caribbean Literature course. This course has no syllabus, order, certification, or end for that matter. This is for life. I read what I want as I am compelled to and I add books as I find them.