Thoreau's Legacy Read Online Free
Author: Richard Hayes
coated buds in latticed ice, rendering them useless for the spring to come, reminding me again how fragile and yet resilient everything is and how carelessly we challenge that resilience.
I curled up by our wood stove and read a book about Inuit shamans on mystical journeys who take on the responsibility of atoning for tribal transgressions and restoring balance to the everyday world. I thought of how our children and grandchildren will be the ones forced to take on that responsibility, apologizing to the planet for the ways we’ve mistreated it.
Michelle Cacho-Negrete
is a retired psychotherapist who now works as a writer. She lives in Wells, Maine, with her husband.
Sugar Shacks,
Snow Cones, and
Sugar Maples
Marian Wineman
The Sugar Shack. My sister’s school in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, was across a dirt road from a dairy farm of rolling hills and steely gray granite boulders. Just inside the farm’s meandering stone walls was an old sugar shack. The dark wood structure, about ten by twelve feet, had multipaned windows and a chimney that looked like a miniature sugar shack atop the steep metal roof.
One day we were shown around the sugar house, with its creaking wooden floorboards. The air inside was so thick, hot, and heavy with sweet vapor that it was nearly intolerable. Wood smoke mingled with the steam. Boiling liquid slowly migrated along a series of sloping interconnected troughs around the perimeter of the shack. We were treated to a taste from each stage of the sugaring-off. The first troughs held a watery, nearly clear liquid. Progressing on down the troughs, the syrup became gradually thicker and darker, its taste increasingly complex.
Snow Cones. Every spring my family spent a long ski weekend at the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Mount Cardigan lodge in New Hampshire. After an eventful day of skiing the rope tow, our mittens sopping wet and the tow often breaking down, we sat down to a tasty dinner, followed by an amazing treat.
Outside the lodge, a huge black iron kettle hung over a roaring fire. Embers snapped and danced upward in the frosty air toward the stark stars overhead. Sweet steam boiled up from the cauldron, obscuring the faces of the others stamping their feet in the snow.
Someone handed me a cup, which I carefully filled to the brim with snow, then timidly tiptoed close to the kettle. Using a big ladle, another person poured thick, steamy dark syrup into my snow-filled cup. A maple snow cone!
Sugar Maples. In recent years sugar maples, the source of maple syrup, have been tapped as early as January instead of in March, the traditional time. As winters warm and spring comes earlier, the perfect sap-producing combination of freezing temperatures at night and thawing during the day occurs on fewer days, and maple syrup production wanes.
As a result of these warming trends, the sugar maples’ unique growing conditions may no longer occur in New England, and the trees may die out. Soon maple syrup may not be produced at all in New England, only in Canada. How can I tell my daughter and grandchildren that we let the iconic sugar maples disappear?
My mom and little brother catching the rope tow at Cardigan, April 1965. Photo by my dad, Robert J. Wineman.
Marian Wineman is an environmental consultant living in Seattle with her husband, their nine-year-old daughter, a hamster, fish, and two cats.
The Unfathomable
in Flux
Danna Staaf
LOS ANGELES IS NOT PARTICULARLY FAMOUS FOR natural beauty, and it is not a coastal city. However, as a child growing up in this urban setting, I was a determined naturalist, and my strongest passion was reserved for creatures of the sea, as portrayed in books and documentaries. Anxious to get a closer look, I decided at the age of twelve to become a scuba diver. Not only did my parents encourage this peculiar ambition, my father enrolled in the scuba course with me.
Our first dives were on Catalina Island, and I recall vividly the thrill of those early
I curled up by our wood stove and read a book about Inuit shamans on mystical journeys who take on the responsibility of atoning for tribal transgressions and restoring balance to the everyday world. I thought of how our children and grandchildren will be the ones forced to take on that responsibility, apologizing to the planet for the ways we’ve mistreated it.
Michelle Cacho-Negrete
is a retired psychotherapist who now works as a writer. She lives in Wells, Maine, with her husband.
Sugar Shacks,
Snow Cones, and
Sugar Maples
Marian Wineman
The Sugar Shack. My sister’s school in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, was across a dirt road from a dairy farm of rolling hills and steely gray granite boulders. Just inside the farm’s meandering stone walls was an old sugar shack. The dark wood structure, about ten by twelve feet, had multipaned windows and a chimney that looked like a miniature sugar shack atop the steep metal roof.
One day we were shown around the sugar house, with its creaking wooden floorboards. The air inside was so thick, hot, and heavy with sweet vapor that it was nearly intolerable. Wood smoke mingled with the steam. Boiling liquid slowly migrated along a series of sloping interconnected troughs around the perimeter of the shack. We were treated to a taste from each stage of the sugaring-off. The first troughs held a watery, nearly clear liquid. Progressing on down the troughs, the syrup became gradually thicker and darker, its taste increasingly complex.
Snow Cones. Every spring my family spent a long ski weekend at the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Mount Cardigan lodge in New Hampshire. After an eventful day of skiing the rope tow, our mittens sopping wet and the tow often breaking down, we sat down to a tasty dinner, followed by an amazing treat.
Outside the lodge, a huge black iron kettle hung over a roaring fire. Embers snapped and danced upward in the frosty air toward the stark stars overhead. Sweet steam boiled up from the cauldron, obscuring the faces of the others stamping their feet in the snow.
Someone handed me a cup, which I carefully filled to the brim with snow, then timidly tiptoed close to the kettle. Using a big ladle, another person poured thick, steamy dark syrup into my snow-filled cup. A maple snow cone!
Sugar Maples. In recent years sugar maples, the source of maple syrup, have been tapped as early as January instead of in March, the traditional time. As winters warm and spring comes earlier, the perfect sap-producing combination of freezing temperatures at night and thawing during the day occurs on fewer days, and maple syrup production wanes.
As a result of these warming trends, the sugar maples’ unique growing conditions may no longer occur in New England, and the trees may die out. Soon maple syrup may not be produced at all in New England, only in Canada. How can I tell my daughter and grandchildren that we let the iconic sugar maples disappear?
My mom and little brother catching the rope tow at Cardigan, April 1965. Photo by my dad, Robert J. Wineman.
Marian Wineman is an environmental consultant living in Seattle with her husband, their nine-year-old daughter, a hamster, fish, and two cats.
The Unfathomable
in Flux
Danna Staaf
LOS ANGELES IS NOT PARTICULARLY FAMOUS FOR natural beauty, and it is not a coastal city. However, as a child growing up in this urban setting, I was a determined naturalist, and my strongest passion was reserved for creatures of the sea, as portrayed in books and documentaries. Anxious to get a closer look, I decided at the age of twelve to become a scuba diver. Not only did my parents encourage this peculiar ambition, my father enrolled in the scuba course with me.
Our first dives were on Catalina Island, and I recall vividly the thrill of those early
Readers choose
David Nickle
Unknown
Robert Silverberg, Damien Broderick
Mignon G. Eberhart
Dorie Greenspan
Denis Johnson
Kathy Dunnehoff
T.J. Bennett