I’ve learned a great deal about plants from Zoë Schlanger. We were in conversation with a roomful of others at Milkweed Bookstore in June. And now I’m making a pitch for you to read her book – The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. […]
My great-grandparents may never have said they were Swedish. Perhaps they said nothing more than that they came from Värmland County in Sweden and, standing back in silence, let others assume. The others were the ones who told me my grandma was a Swede from Värmland. None of them mentioned that Värmland was the forest […]
Pictured here the immigrant Anderson Family: Bottom row – Lars, Mabel, and Lisa; Top row – Mathew, Levi, and Alma The Mystery Even as children, my siblings and I knew we were mostly Norwegian. (We must have known we were legally Americans, but we never called ourselves that.) Our mother’s father (morfar in Norwegian) came […]
Grace Harnois – by lucky fate my daughter-in-law – hosts a super-cool podcast. Last month she invited me to talk with her about John Gardner’s Grendel because we have both had soft spots for Grendel and his tormented mother more than we have for that hard-hearted hero Mr. Beowulf. Grendel and his mom were likely […]
Some of you may remember from Watershed that one of my brothers was developing a method of using native Minnesota bacteria from swamps and Minnesota iron to remove sulfate from water that has been impacted by closed taconite mines. This process is of greater importance to me now since the lake I wrote about, Birch Lake, […]
This piece describes the watershed of my city home, was written for Transition Town – All Saint Anthony Park, and was published in the Park Bugle in March of 2020. Half to three-quarters of your body is water. Of the earth’s surface, about 70% is water. Where did the water in you come from? When […]
“Did your dad tell you about the strawberry birthmark?” my aunt asked. I was driving north with her on 35 in the summer of 1989, an occasional moth splattering plumply against the windshield. “What’s a strawberry birthmark?” I asked, glancing quizzically at Aunt Dorothy in the passenger seat. Her silver hair fanned out along the […]
