An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
I was standing in the shadows of my kitchen, looking out into blazing summer heat. What I saw instead of backyard summer green was the death of elephants. Hundreds of them. I saw the Babar I’d loved as a child, … Continued
Dear Mayor Coleman, a bevy of city workers met me at the cottonwood tree this afternoon – if bevy is quite the word to include a burly Public Works guy. There they all were, kind, and informative. What seemed to … Continued
When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, she imagined a neighborhood so quiet as to be dead. All the birds gone due to DDT’s effect on thinning their shells and killing the worms and insects they ate. Today we … Continued
“My home is my castle” makes me think of an impregnable, guarded estate, high above the plebs. That might work for some city or suburban neighborhoods but not for mine in Saint Paul. Here with lots leaving about ten feet … Continued
For years “bat attacks” in my Minnesota residences wrought terror so extreme I was reduced to a quivering mass. What! Malevolent creatures flying across the moon, then swooping into my hair! Didn’t they carry rabies? On dark winter nights, I … Continued
My yearly summer jaunt up to the North Shore of Lake Superior used to run me home through a lazy blizzard of black and orange–not Iowa Hawkeye footballers, but Monarch butterflies on their way south and west. This year, I … Continued
About eight summers ago, driving home to the Twin Cities from vacationing on the North Shore, I routinely encountered many Monarch butterflies taking their lazy flight south. Then suddenly a year or two later, there were almost none. Around the … Continued
What explains a passion for an animal and a faraway place? I certainly did not grow up with live elephants. When I was a kid in South Carolina, there were no elephants in sight. Not even at the zoo, a … Continued
I thought it was a hawk as first. Swiveling its beaked head almost completely around. Sitting high in the white pine, level with my second floor windows. Big but not enormous. Not an eagle. Not a condor! The bird … Continued