As autumn settles in, I am getting busily to work on my new book called, in its working-title, The Urban Bestiary. It’s a wonderful project (if I may say so!) that explores our constant continuity with the wild earth through our daily coexistence with wild animals (as well as other …
In her book, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, the wonderful desert nature writer Ellen Meloy wrote, shortly before her sudden death (a great loss to us all) about a flicker that had been incessantly drumming her house. She had named him Stalin, and one morning she …
Amdist the brown branches of February woodlands and urban forests in the Pacific Northwest, one native shrub always turns out the first flowers and bright new leaves– the Indian Plum. The pendants of tiny greenish-white flower clusters fall beneath glowing green leaves that stick straight up, like the ears of …
Every morning it’s the same. I wake up in the darkness while my loved ones still sleep. I tiptoe into the kitchen to make coffee. The Pot sits there on the stove, in the shadows. And out of the silence, it speaks: “Well, Haupt, what’s for dinner?” What a rude …
Dear friends, I hope you won’t mind an off-topic post this week. Many of you know that Tom, my husband, works for a global health program at the University of Washington, and that his group has an office in Haiti with more than thirty local staff. Because of this, we’ve …
For my seventh birthday, my mom gave me a pair of light blue knitting needles and a ball of white yarn. She didn’t know how to knit, but sent me across the backyard to our neighbor’s house, where the retired librarian Marion Milligan took me under her wing. Marion taught …
It’s the peak of tomato season in Seattle–the plants are covered with the most beautiful shades of green, orange, yellow, red, and burgundy. We are canning tomatoes, drying tomatoes, making salsa, carrying baskets of tomatoes to neighbors, concocting tomato recipes, and of course eating cherry tomatoes like they’re potato chips. …
Every year I happily, and rather naively, plot out my plan for hazelnut foraging in the neighborhood: which park trees look hopeful, which neighbors have fruitful hazelnut trees in their yards and might be persuaded to let me harvest a few. My aspirations are simple, and mainly even symbolic. I …
Though The Tangled Nest is still quite new, and it may seem early to be going on a blog vacation, I will nevertheless be taking a short spring break from: 1. The List (you know the one) 2. The cold Seattle weather 3. Extremely edifying books 4. Things that plug …