my oregano is growing!
(not a peep yet from basil or chives. c'mon, little digs!)
Little and i enjoyed an evening romp & roll in the front yard. i love these cool evenings. and the deeper i get into richard louv's book on the so-called nature-deficit disorder of our children's generation, the more i want to spend every second outside. last night we went hunting for tadpoles in the creek and found lots. lizards too. all the way home, Little said bye-bye to the bees.
6 comments:
tadpole hunting huh? see your girls will be well rounded. this mom won't go do stuff like that. they'll have to go with daddy if they want that kind of action!!
thanks for the blog reformat. now even us lame mac users can see the new posts & pics.
& don't worry too much about the basic or chives: once they come, they come. (esp. the chives.)
Grandma Stimpson used to recite the Longfellow poem to me all the time, mostly when I was being naughty. It's one of my earliest memories! I didn't know it was Longfellow's though...until just now!
JT, you are so right!!! Here come the basil and the chives! not to be outdone, i guess.
Yay! I've started putting chives in my scrambled eggs. Mmmmmmm.... chives in scrambled eggs.... [Homer gurgle]
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I haven't had time to look into this nature-deficit disorder idea, but I confess I'm a bit skeptical.
My research deals in part with our relationship to the actual earth and the way we cognitively landscape it: I deal a bit with the fetishization of the pastoral, with the designation of wilderness (which, as Edward Abbey points out, we've decided must be "managed" by entities like the Forest Service: a managed wilderness?!?) There's also the major Eastern traditions that see physical nature — even the most unspoiled and pristine lands — as inherently corrupt, illusory.
On the other hand, the concept of the pastoral landscape as refuge and Godland has been with us in the West for about as long as we've been writing and living in non-pastoral situations, so there's something there. One of my favorite works on this side of the argument is Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America. I highly recommend it.
So, if nature is corrupt, do you become corrupt by association?
It's pretty basic for me: i need contact with the natural world, not apart from humanity but with a lower ratio of people:weeds, very often. My 2 short years in NYC only confirmed this for me, though I have always felt it, since my earliest memories playing in the undeveloped lots, blackberry bushes, creeks of our kid-dom.
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