Archive: Nature Blog
not with a bang but a whimper
(Entry #8) I feel a bit as if I’m starring in a new movie called Park, Interrupted. Last week, as I left the Walled Garden slightly angry at the crowds, I consoled myself that I’d be able to come again next week, one last time, for one last entry in this university-assigned nature blog. Imagine my […]
you’re not in it
(Entry 7) This sunset light is perfect, and I’d like to take a selfie, but I can’t, because I’m too self-conscious. Families have invaded Mellon Garden today. They’re like Biblical locusts, swarming all my usual haunts — the weeping pine, the fountain, the stone bench. Nearly all these families have already spawned, with one to […]
just keep swimming
(Entry #6) Creatively, I feel the way my park looks: dying, drying up, out of time. When you enter Mellon Park’s Walled Garden from the northwest, you walk up a slight ramp, a railing along the right. My tree, a weeping Eastern white pine, lives in the nook here, but before you see that tree, […]
i’m gonna marry the night
(Entry #5) As I am a night owl, I have wanted to go to my park at night. The Walled Garden at Mellon Park has an art installation, built by Janet Zweig, that commemorates the birthday of Ann Katherine Seamans, a woman who frequented the park. I’m not sure why this woman had a restoration, […]
in undergrad i was a member of the “i talk to squirrels” facebook group
(Entry #4) Right now, the sky is split down the middle, as if two opposite sisters have drawn a line of demarcation down their bedroom. In front of me is the angry sister, the sad sister, the Goth sister, the one who wears only shades of black. She’s Eeyore in front of me. Behind me […]
you’re a mean one, mr. grinch
(Entry #3) Something is wrong. I’m not sure what. I feel a bit like the Grinch, who hated Christmas but no one knew why. (“It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all may […]
it wasn’t roaring, it was weeping
(Entry #2) Today is the autumnal equinox, an astronomical event that marks the beginning of fall in the northern hemisphere. Here in Pittsburgh, the weather has already acquiesced. The cloying heat of the past few weeks has relented — it is a brisk, breezy 61° F (16° C) as I walk to Mellon Park this […]
the world was all before him
(Entry #1) (Images with a border have a hover/click effect.) As I walk down Fifth Avenue, cars racing past me, high-rise apartments towering over me, power lines outlining the labyrinth of paved streets and cement sidewalks, I have my doubts. I have been tasked with the creation of a nature blog; to create a nature […]
In which I start a nature journal
At Chatham, one of the requirements to graduate with the MFA is a course on either environmental writing or travel writing. As a fiction writer, I am not directly interested in either, but I’ve opted to take environmental writing this semester instead of travel next. One of the requirements for the environmental writing course is […]