I just finished the book I have been reading for a while. A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm, by Edwin Way Teale. If you know anything about the guy at all, you might guess that he isn't exactly a believer. Actually, he sadly never recognized the Great Creator one time in the book. I can still enjoy books like this because it reminds me to enjoy the great outdoors.
I look at my 'great outdoors' and am not thrilled about it all the time. We live on a paved street, we are surrounded by houses and ho-hum trees....I can't see the sunset OR the sunrise from any spot in our yard.
I don't have a porch filled with bird-feeders that attract orange birds, I don't have a path to a pond, chickens are out of the question and thanks to the tree next door, I can't even grow a tomato.
BUT, I can do what I can do to make our 'great outdoors' as great as I can. I have tried to create, on our small spot, some pretty things to look at.
I will probably never live anywhere else, so I daily try to enjoy where I do live. Most of the time, it's not that hard. I always have in the back of my mind....there's LOTS of people that would like to live where we do!! right?
Here are some quotes out of the book I enjoyed:
Lake Chargoggagoggmanchaugagoggchaubunagunganaugg- it means "You fish on your side, I'll fish on my side, and nobody fishes in the middle."
On the hottest days of summer, lying in the shade beside the brook, it was pleasant to listen to all the natural sounds around me and in imagination to trace them to their sources. Catbirds mewed and towhees called their clear "che-winks" and, under the cumulus clouds high overhead, a soaring red shouldered hawk repeated its scream, that shrill, wild, far-carrying "kee-you" the bluejays so frequently imitate.
The Duckling Path, along which a mallard female one year brought its brood from a nest hidden in the tangles of Veery Lane, ended beside Beaver Rock.
An ancient grapevine winds among its boughs and, in September, crows and foxes come to get the fruit.
Twice barn swallows have constructed their mud nests and reared their broods on top of the projecting floodlight just outside the kitchen door.
A cottontail rabbit came hopping over the drifts in the dawn of that third day after Christmas. The thermometer stood at zero. But the nightlong gale, the winds, and the driving snow were gone.
Thus day after day, in snow and ice, in sunshine and under heavy skies, while the thermometer rises and drops, all through the winter, cold-weather birds, the birds of the north wind, surround us.
The ashes of an oak in the chimney are no epitaph of that oak, to tell me how high or how large it was: it tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood: nor what men it hurt when it fell.
I look at my 'great outdoors' and am not thrilled about it all the time. We live on a paved street, we are surrounded by houses and ho-hum trees....I can't see the sunset OR the sunrise from any spot in our yard.
I don't have a porch filled with bird-feeders that attract orange birds, I don't have a path to a pond, chickens are out of the question and thanks to the tree next door, I can't even grow a tomato.
BUT, I can do what I can do to make our 'great outdoors' as great as I can. I have tried to create, on our small spot, some pretty things to look at.
I will probably never live anywhere else, so I daily try to enjoy where I do live. Most of the time, it's not that hard. I always have in the back of my mind....there's LOTS of people that would like to live where we do!! right?
Here are some quotes out of the book I enjoyed:
Lake Chargoggagoggmanchaugagoggchaubunagunganaugg- it means "You fish on your side, I'll fish on my side, and nobody fishes in the middle."
On the hottest days of summer, lying in the shade beside the brook, it was pleasant to listen to all the natural sounds around me and in imagination to trace them to their sources. Catbirds mewed and towhees called their clear "che-winks" and, under the cumulus clouds high overhead, a soaring red shouldered hawk repeated its scream, that shrill, wild, far-carrying "kee-you" the bluejays so frequently imitate.
The Duckling Path, along which a mallard female one year brought its brood from a nest hidden in the tangles of Veery Lane, ended beside Beaver Rock.
An ancient grapevine winds among its boughs and, in September, crows and foxes come to get the fruit.
Twice barn swallows have constructed their mud nests and reared their broods on top of the projecting floodlight just outside the kitchen door.
A cottontail rabbit came hopping over the drifts in the dawn of that third day after Christmas. The thermometer stood at zero. But the nightlong gale, the winds, and the driving snow were gone.
Thus day after day, in snow and ice, in sunshine and under heavy skies, while the thermometer rises and drops, all through the winter, cold-weather birds, the birds of the north wind, surround us.
The ashes of an oak in the chimney are no epitaph of that oak, to tell me how high or how large it was: it tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood: nor what men it hurt when it fell.
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