Peri McQuay

Peri Phillips McQuay is the author of Singing Meadow: The Adventure of Creating a Country Home, The View From Foley Mountain, a book of nature meditations on her experiences living for 30 years at the Foley Mountain Conservation Area and A Wing in the Door: Life With a Red-tailed Hawk is the story of her adventures with Merak, a human-imprinted hawk, who lived free but saw McQuay and her family as her special people. Also Peri has written numerous essays, articles, book reviews and a weekly column, published in the Kingston Whig-Standard Magazine. Her credits include Country Journal, Harrowsmith, Bird Watcher’s Digest, The Snowy Egret, Seasons, The Fiddlehead, Herizons and Brick.

Lupine

Leave a Comment / Inspiration, Simple Living

Lupine Sometimes, as I age, I wonder just how small and slow I can go. As my journey takes me deeper, rather than broader, as I am moved to cast off more things, sometimes my new standard of enough is alarming. Are you sure you won’t need this? Yes, as long-time inspiration E.F. Schumacher insisted …

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Friend-From-Long-Ago

Leave a Comment / Foley Mountain C.A., People

OLD FRIEND FROM LONG AGO How extraordinary. Last winter I received an email from Nancy, a friend I hadn’t talked with since I was nine: I was researching Canadian women nature writers when I came upon your name. It is you, isn’t it? Peri is an unusual name. How to explain very different lifetimes? How …

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Dearness

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Dearness There lives the dearest freshness deep down things, Gerard Manly Hopkins This is my world. I am standing in rain, something slightly more than a mist. Behind me, yellow petals fall from the astonishing blaze of forsythias. At long last we have come to the greening of the year. There are the tiniest, sour-green …

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Girl Guides
GIRL GUIDES If I still was always most at home in my beloved woods, joining Girl Guides helped me integrate my home life with a wider world. It was a fortunate time to discover Guides. Here was an approach very different from that we experienced at school where we had no say in what we […]
The Place of Tides
The Place of Tides In acclaimed farmer/author, James Rebanks’ previous best-selling books, [The Shepherd’s Life and Pastoral Song] he told of how our rural landscapes and age-old wisdom have been brought almost to a final destruction. With his new book, The Place of Tides, he writes again of these profound concerns, of what to make […]
Midsummer
Midsummer The steaming, lush meadow The bluebirds have flown from their house. The field grasses are high. My summer this year is necessarily quiet as I wait for hip replacement surgery. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t rich. I still look forward to sending out blog posts. (There is so much to talk about–the dailiness […]
Lupine
Lupine Sometimes, as I age, I wonder just how small and slow I can go. As my journey takes me deeper, rather than broader, as I am moved to cast off more things, sometimes my new standard of enough is alarming. Are you sure you won’t need this? Yes, as long-time inspiration E.F. Schumacher insisted […]
Friend-From-Long-Ago
OLD FRIEND FROM LONG AGO How extraordinary. Last winter I received an email from Nancy, a friend I hadn’t talked with since I was nine: I was researching Canadian women nature writers when I came upon your name. It is you, isn’t it? Peri is an unusual name. How to explain very different lifetimes? How […]