Book completed

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Five stars! This book is a classic of ecological literature. I've seen Kimmerer speak three times, twice in person and once online, when her trip to Eugene this year was cancelled for the pandemic. I started reading her other book, Gathering Moss, essays and reflections inspired by different types of moss, but haven't finished it. This one, though, is fantastic. I bought it in the fall, when the alumni book club was going to read it, but I didn't start until after Kimmerer's last talk, and then I realized it's a teaching book, where I should read one chapter a day and dwell with it a bit before going on to the next. I am sure that I'll be rereading it soon too.

Kimmerer is both a botany professor, so, a fully qualified scientist, and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi nation, well versed in indigenous traditions. Much of the point of the book is to shift how we think about the natural world, learning to see plants as our teachers and to consider relationships with the Earth that are more reciprocal, less extractive. Every chapter shares something from her own life, informed by both scientific and indigenous perspectives, and her writing is always beautiful. It makes me very happy to spend time with this book.

Day 718: Ancient trash

I finally made some more progress on cleaning out the trunk of my old car. It's nearly half done, I think? Eventually I'll be able to donate it and start parking my new car in my own driveway! J. is looking forward to that, as he'll be able to keep his car inside his garage again. (He's not comfortable backing out with my new car in his driveway.)

I also took down some old Christmas lights from J's iron structures that separate the roses from the lawn. One of the strands turned out to work! And I pruned some of the rose bush behind his house that has outlasted the barrel it was planted in. Maybe we can build a planter box around it or something.

Then I was sleepy and watched the most recent Aurora Teagarden mystery, which was pretty fun. Niall Matter has grown a much, much thicker beard, which obscures his cuteness a bit.



Okay, the process of finding that photo revealed what had happened - he'd had a major cut on his face with more than 20 stitches and decided the best way to deal with it for filming would be to grow his beard in really fast.