Author: Tom

I take some pleasure in the way our house looks so radically different from the front and the back. From the street, it looks like the post-colonial 1840 house that its origins make it. It is right on the street as older houses are, and it is surrounded by its newer neighbors: 1850 on one side, 1880…

Last Friday, Madalene and I set out for a walk along the shore of the Atlantic Ocean in the Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island. This is about a fifteen minute drive from our home. We parked our car in the small, empty parking lot, and climbed the few steps to the railingless boardwalk that gently…

Winter is not as flashy as the other seasons, but its spare beauty allows us the chance to look more closely and see more clearly. We can see the subtle variations of grays and browns, the undulations of the land itself, hidden in other seasons by mounds of plant life. Winter clears things off and…

Sugar Maples are especially noticeable as they prepare to shed their leaves in the fall; with the proper conditions in the mountains of Northern Pennsylvania, they glow gold and red. “The Tree of Appearances” wonders whether the leaves hide or reveal the tree.

Maple 2 Cross Sections reflects on the connection between one of our sugar maples, the efforts of a Flicker and a CAT scan. And death. It talks about death.

 The Tree of Knowledge is the first essay in the collection Thirteen Sugar Maples.  It begins the exploration of the space between our internal response and the external activity of the natural world around us by looking at my relation to a specific tree.