A Sense of Home My childhood home, painted by my artist father, Ken Phillips It begins with my beloved childhood home, the little, brown-shingled house which my father and grandfathers and uncles had built in the heart of a small, 3-acre woods. It was the centre of my world, and I loved it fiercely–the wind travelling, travelling through the hemlocks, and up to the nearby twin guardian pines, and ending at the white oak that pressed up against my bedroom …
Fog Forest [Recently, I was fortunate to live for a week within the power of the tides and fogs, and even now I remain haunted by a week where all was movement and change.] Slip off the twisty coastal road in Maine and you will be heading for the sea. Your excitement is mounting. It is the distant tolling of a bell which is drawing you through the dim light of a narrow lane which is surrounded by a magical …
My Lost Woods The Lost Woods I have never forgotten nature writer Edwin Way Teale’s remembrance of an Indiana woods he encountered where he was surrounded by “great silent winter trees—oak, beech, hickory, ash and sycamore.” As a small boy he had travelled there with his grandfather. Then, while his grandfather loaded stove wood on their bobsleigh, he had wandered through “gloomy aisles between the trees. Branches rubbed together in the breeze with sudden shrieks or mournful wailings and the …