[Okay, so it’s Teaser Thursday and I’m late! But it’s been a bit of a week.]

After the first good snowfall of the season, I ski back out to the place I’ve learned to call ‘Botany Pond.’ Deep snow is winter’s prism, transforming one species’ risk into another’s opportunity. Entranced by crystals of hoar frost on aspen and the lean exclamation of weaselltracks, I think about how some stories can only be learned in certain seasons. In the impressionable canvas of fresh snow, drama can run quiet or wild. Prints of miniscule mice barely indent; snowshoe hare float this way and then that. And then I ski across the tracks of what I think might be a wolf or a lynx. Alone, without my dog, hobbled by snow, I panic. Even as I flee to the security of an open vista, familiarity haunts my tracks. Risk, I remember, always lurks beneath winter’s white. As a child, winter diminished woodpiles, froze pipes and stuck trucks in snow. Snapshots from a single season never tell the whole story. Embedded in today’s bitterness are the ecological processes—seeds chill, moisture collects—necessary for tomorrow’s unfolding. Only by lingering in place can we remember that winter and summer, opportunity and risk, are always conjoined.

Coming April 25, 2023!https://rmbooks.com/book/drawing-botany-home/

Teaser Tuesday #2 for Drawing Botany Home (https://rmbooks.com/book/drawing-botany-home/)

Animals move—it’s our birthright, a gift from our ancestors in the form of duplicate genes that code for leg or wing or fin. Yet no mobility is without risk. When my mother married a stranger, my family abandoned British Columbia for Montana. Years later, I jump at the chance to return. But arriving ‘home,’ I struggle to land in place. En route to visit old friends, I wonder what it would take to be as rooted as a tree. For cottonwoods, dispersal is easy, establishment harder. Only one in a million seeds released from a cottonwood will successfully root. All trees are mirrored rivers, their form collecting nourishment from both sky and earth—but only if they remain in place. The bigger a tree’s roots, the harder the transplant, the deeper the scars. The bigger a tree’s roots, the harder the transplant, the deeper the scars. In plants, it is the passage of water, slipping from one cell to another, that links earth with sky. In the reciprocal relationship between people and place, don’t stories do the same?