Words matter. These are the best Sue Hubbell Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Great Wass Island Preserve is a 1,579-acre Nature Conservancy jewel, a place of spectacular botanical interest, and Jonesport is situated on a postcard-pretty harbor. Tourism is not serious business in those parts – boat building and fishing are – and there are no signs telling how to get to Great Wass. But I know.
I am an early riser.
Late August still feels like summer here in the Ozarks, but it is the time of year the nighthawks are moving on to their South American wintering grounds.
In the wild, those traits that are adaptive for survival and reproductive advantage are brought out through natural selection. So cats that were fierce, furtive hunters, alert to the snapping of every twig, with coats that gave them good camouflage, would have been favored by evolution.
My maternal grandmother, Annie Sparks, lived with our family during the while I was growing up. When I came home from school, after having made a detour to the kitchen to pour a glass of milk and fix a thick peanut butter sandwich on easy-to-tear white bread, I would go up to her sitting room.
Our human calendars take little notice of such dates, but nighthawk migrations tell of shortening days and a season’s end.
Every spring, I begin cutting my firewood for the upcoming winter. It should be cut months ahead of time so it will dry and cure.
Fiddling with the genetic identities of domesticated plants and animals ever since we had become human. We are the fiddlingest animal the world has ever seen.
Spring starts in January in the Ozarks, lurches on in a complicated way, with spurts and setbacks, until May. Then, early in May, there is a cold spell known as blackberry winter because it comes when blackberries bloom. It is a worrisome week for anyone who farms.
Greer is Missouri’s second-largest spring. It is a place of pounding, frothing waters and of greeny-cool moss-covered rock, a place of fern and cliffy splendor.
For a long, long time, nearly 40 years, I never had any bees. I can’t think why.
Precision, directness, and quickness are what human beings are good at. What we have never been good at – in our past, at least – is figuring out the impact, the consequences, of what our skills have allowed us to do.
A rule about portages: the longer and harder they are, the fewer people will make them.
I’ve lived all over the country – Michigan, California, Texas, New Jersey, Rhode Island and, now, Maine – but I never understood springtime until I spent 25 years farming in the Ozarks.
You have to take springtime on its own terms in the Ozarks: there is no other way. It can’t be predicted. It is unsteady, full of promise, promise that is sometimes broken. It is also bawdy, irrepressible, excessive, fecund, willful.
Strictly speaking, one never ‘keeps’ bees – one comes to terms with their wild nature.
Bees are easier to keep than a dog or a cat. They are more interesting than gerbils. They can be kept anywhere.
I married a university professor, raised a son, and worked as an academic librarian. My husband and I moved to the Ozarks, bought a farm, and started a commercial beekeeping business. And divorced.
The Ozarks are old and worn mountains from the geological past.
We humans are a minority of giants stumbling around in a world of little things.
Everyone should have two or three hives of bees.
Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals.
