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Showing posts from July, 2013

The Dog Stars and The Larch

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We should all love a place as deeply as nature writer Rick Bass loves the Yaak Valley - sink to our knees awed by the splendor, find ourselves seduced as Bass tells us he was in his award-winning essay "The Larch: A Love Story" (published in Orion Magazine and winner of a 2013 John Burroughs Award ). I have never written as eloquently about the places I love as Bass, but I understand that loving takes root in knowing.     Yesterday I was on my knees in the mountain meadow my horse calls home, gathering samples of different grasses.   I brought them home and spread them on the deck and with hummingbirds zinging overhead (scolding the sapsucker who was stealing their nectar), I carefully opened my Bear Lodge Mountains plant field guide .   Pressed between the pages were leaves and blossoms and stalks from plants that lived with my children in those same mountains - wild geranium, cinquefoil, coneflower, mountain brome, thimbleberry, bur oak.   I love those oaks like Bas