nature

Tending to your inner landscapes

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This is a post about gardening. Sort of. I started writing this post years ago, but like many of my posts, it was abandoned as I pursued more pressing needs. But some of those half-completed posts are ready to get hosed off and sent out into the world – especially as we begin a new season of tending to growing things.

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A swallowtail enjoying the red valerian.

You might know an old lady who’s crazy about her garden. She’s that lady with the wide-brimmed straw hat and strands of frizzy gray hair hanging out in all directions. She wears floppy, long-sleeved shirts, cushy, mud-covered crocs, and always has dirt beneath her fingernails. She’s out there every day when the weather’s nice enough, tending to her garden, chatting with passersby as she digs up another bed or pulls out another patch of weeds.

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Protecting our National Parks is an Act of Patriotism

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Some of my first memories involve riding on my Dad’s shoulders as we hiked past stinky geysers that shot mist and clouds high above our heads. I also remember staring into the abyss of a yellow-walled canyon, while water foamed and gurgled nearby, then raced over the rim. At night we had the thrill of sleeping in a log cabin with bunk beds – but Mom said I was too small to sleep in the top bunk. I was almost three years old the first time I visited Yellowstone National Park, on a road trip with my parents from California to visit my grandmother in Ohio.

Returning to Yellowstone’s stinky glaciers at a much later point in life.

We also took a helicopter ride over the Badlands (which were several years away from becoming a national park at that point). I remember wearing headphones that pinched my head as we swooped over a landscape that, to me, looked like a layered ice cream sundae.

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