Sunday, January 13, 2013

In Which I Tell You Some Things I Like

I like drainage ditches overflowing with wild natives, like common milkweed, and dogwood, and bergamot, and goldenrod. I found my first monarch butterfly caterpillars on the milkweed that grew in the ditch in front of my parents' house. I reared one, on leaves I plucked daily, in a Styrofoam cup, until it became a chrysalis. Then I lost or threw away the cup, I can't remember. It was many years before I ever collected another living bug, I felt so bad about how that attempt with the monarch butterfly turned out, endangered as they were, or were in my mind, I thought I was helping the creature but in reality it had better chances where it was found. I've never wanted to collect bugs, anyway, and go through the trauma of the kill jar and the pin board. I'm happy to have chance encounters in the garden, or in the woods, or even in the basement where several cobweb weavers live, and put on terrifying display the wild assortment of insects that live in our homes unseen except as corpses beneath a spider's web. The variety is astonishing.

Thursday, January 3, 2013

My Year in Books, 2012

Compared to so many other year-end list makers, I'm a little late to the game. I love to read Year in Review lists, I like to see what other people are reading, why they read it, if my list has anything in common with theirs. I saw one guy's list on tumblr, and he included shots of the cover of every book he read, and a short review of each book. I'm not doing that, not today anyway, but I might get around to it some other time. For now, here's my list of the books I read in 2012.