When my younger brother and I were kids, our father would often enlist us in his work crew of one. We cleared brush in the woods around the house, raked leaves, mucked out stables in the barn, and helped him build decorative rock walls, which he constructed on every property he ever owned. Frequently, Dad…

Even in the awakening of new life in springtime and in Eastertide (the time that stretches beyond Easter), there comes the sweet yet sad reminder of the fleetingness of things, that all that lives must die. This is a favorite subject of poetry. The freshness of spring is all too brief, as Robert Frost’s famous…

I’ve known ere now an interfering branch Of alder catch my lifted axe behind me. But that was in the woods, to hold my hand From striking at another alder’s roots, And that was, as I say, an alder branch. This was a man, Baptiste, who stole one day Behind me on the snow in…

Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. There is nothing like a paradox to entice the mind to discover a suggested secret….