If not the very first to flower in the Central Wisconsin spring, the radiant yellow Marsh Marigold is by far the most exciting of the spring ephemerals.  These perky bouquets love shallow seeps of water, poking their golden heads above a green nest of round edged leaves, and where conditions are favorable, they carpet the wet, leafless spring woods for several glorious weeks in April.  My first picture this year is dated April 14th, about the time our Forsythia blooms.  This early splash of color in the drab days not long after winter's end is joy incarnate.  It demands a trip into the ditch for pictures that get enthusiastically shared broadly ...

Robert Frost said it first and clear enough: “Something there is that doesn't love a wall.”    His walls were stony ones, upended and broken by frosty, heaving ground.  The walls I do not love are stony too, built not on pastureland, though, but in the hearts of men and women.  These heart-stone walls, held fast by a mortar mix of fear and a very human bent for being right and those different, dead wrong.  We, thus, protect our neat and tidy interior lawns from the invasive and rambunctiously threatening swamps and woods beyond our perimeters.  This tangled, messy jungle outside our wall is us, humanity, all eight and a tenth billion of ...

Late in the afternoon, about three months ago my wife and I were given the opportunity to time travel right here in Central Wisconsin, and we took it. Time machines are stashed here and there in these parts, though to most they would look like a pond, or a small wetland, or even the little pockets of water that dot the woods each spring.  I had just put away my ax after splitting some of next winter's firewood when we set off down the road. We had barely gone a hundred yards when we unexpectedly stepped through a kind of science fiction portal into a soundscape around two hundred million years old.  Our time trip came about compliments of a choir of ...