For most of my adult life, I wore a red coat when the weather got cold. It started when I was 22 and searching for new outerwear during my first winter in Philadelphia. I kept being drawn to a bright red peacoat in a mail-order catalog. Perhaps it reminded me of home in Alabama, the color of the ubiquitous cardinals perched among green pine needles. (more….)
This is the month of blank, lowering skies, when the last of the leaves lift and drift away into a drizzly wind. The hardwood trees would normally be bare by mid-November, even in the South, but seasonal cues can be hard to read in this changing climate. It was 98 degrees in Nashville on October 1, and before that the usual September rains never came. I feared there would be no color at all this fall. (more….)
From inside my air-conditioned house, the light through my windows looks the way October light is supposed to look — mild, quiet, entirely unlike the thin light of winter or the sparkling light of spring or the unrelenting light of summer. In normal years, October is a month for open windows in Middle Tennessee. For cool, damp mornings. For colored leaves that quake in the wind before letting go and lifting away. For afternoon shadows so lovely they fill me with a longing I can’t even name. (more….)
A few years ago I started noticing wildflowers blooming beside the highway: ironweed and goldenrod and snakeroot and black-eyed Susan. The first time it happened the sun was in my eyes as I drove west toward Memphis, and a late summer drought was filling the air with dust motes. For a moment I thought I was imagining flowers where flowers had never been before. A daydream on a lonesome stretch of highway as twilight came on. (more….)
My whole family was watching the HBO series “Chernobyl” when a big sugar maple tree in our front yard split in half, falling a few feet short of the corner of the house. We didn’t hear the actual crash, perhaps because the storm that took out the tree was already so loud, perhaps because the dramatized cataclysm on the television in our family room was louder still, or at least more absorbing. (more….)
Certain old-fashioned words from fairy tales and storybooks still cling to me from childhood. Moor. Vale. Bog. Glade. For a child, such words conjure magical places — untouched, holy lands where fairies might live and animals might speak in ways I understand. Not long after I moved to Tennessee, I heard the term “limestone cedar glade” for the first time and immediately thought again of magic. (more….)
Sing, O muse, of the lumbering opossum, of the nearsighted, stumbling opossum, whose only defenses are a hiss, a hideous scowl and a rank scent emitted in terror. Let us rejoice in the pink-nosed, pink-fingered opossum, her silvery pouch full of babies, each no bigger than a honeybee. (more….)
The gift of springtime is the panoply of new life: gray buds breaking open into bright flowers, gray branches sprouting leaves in a thousand shades of green to make a bower of our common lives. In the treetops, birds throw back their heads to sing their full-throated, body-shuddering songs. (more….)
Zach Richardson also owns a flock of sheep that he deploys all over the city to manage invasive vegetation in a safe, ecologically sensitive and cost-effective way. The Nashville Chew Crew, as he calls his flock, will eat even the most noxious invasive plants: kudzu, mimosa, English ivy, euonymus, Bradford pear, you name it. (more….)
In the far northwest corner of Tennessee, just this side of the Mississippi River, lies a landscape like no other. Reelfoot Lake is less a lake than a system of bayous, creeks and swampland connected by areas of shallow open water. It was created in the winter of 1811-1812 when a series of powerful earthquakes and aftershocks caused 15,000 acres of cypress forest to sink. The waters of the Mississippi River rushed into the depression. (more….)
