Robert burst into the kitchen, “The monarchs are here! They’re in the prairie on the Blazing Stars!” I put down the zucchini I was shredding for lunch, wiped my hands on my apron, and grabbed …

“What I believe in is ‘joyful fatalism’ – my own term,” Patti told me as we caught up after a 37-year-haitus. In 1985, Patti and I were Spanish teachers, she in Iowa and I, in …

A Sunday in late June, anticipated since the dark, icy days of January, finally arrived with the blue skies and green grass expected of such a day in Minnesota. The enthusiastic committee members had spent …

A thunderstorm roared through this morning, knocking out the electricity, uprooting a dozen trees, and producing excellent mosquito hatch conditions. This is exactly the type of morning you don’t want to wake up to if …

Life is returning to my tundra. Like old friends, the cooing of the mourning dove greets me, mixed with the peenting of the snipe on my walks down gravel roads. Robins land on the overhead …

It was a trip planned for spring 2020, before the world closed down abruptly, cancelling plans from visiting elder family members to foreign forays. The plan was hatched before humans hunkered down inside their homes, …

The snow rose in piles over the edge of the hill before sloping down to the frozen Mississippi River. We snowshoed along a narrow path left from those who went before us this winter, stopping …

Early February morning pinks and lavenders outline the clouds in the eastern sky before exposing a tree line, then the frozen garden, and snowshoe paths to the woodshed. My winter eyes are used to a …

Braiding Sweetgrass is a book making the rounds these days with good reason. Author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes poetically from her spirit and theoretically, as a scientist.  She is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of …