The Dog Stars and The Larch
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...