This week’s newsletter is mostly a farm report. Often, I include a short report, but this one is long.

She Had Fruit Trees, a Full Freezer, and Candy in the Dishes

The farm lodged in my memory is my grandmother’s, where I spent most Saturdays as a girl.

My grandmama’s name was Beulah. She did everything. She planted, weeded, fertilized, hoed, harvested. She ran the tractor, fed the mules.

I grew up eight miles away on a junkyard in rural south Georgia. This was the 60s and 70s. Life at Beulah’s farm was very different from life at the junkyard. I eagerly awaited Saturdays and the hope that I’d be allowed to spend the day with Grandmama.

Her farm was rich. She grew a huge garden. Her chest freezer was loaded with field peas and creamed corn. Her pantry shelves were stacked with jars of tomatoes, sauces, jellies. She liked to bake cakes. She could afford store-bought cookies and ice-cream bars. She kept small candy dishes around her house full of peppermint and butterscotch.

I wanted everything she had.

Grandmama had planted fruit trees all over her yard. For most of the growing season, fruit could be found outside—crabapples, blackberries, Southern apples, plums, muscadines. In fall, pecans fell from the trees around her farmhouse. I couldn’t really take candy from the dishes without asking permission, but anything outside was free for the eating.

Grandmama’s farm was so pretty, flowers and fruit and birds. And so interesting, always something happening.

I knew from a very young age that I wanted to live that life.

Now, I do.

Where do you fit with farming?

A farm stands, for most of us, in the not-too-distant past. Our grandparents were farmers. Or our great-grandparents. How many generations since a farm was part of your life? Do you find yourself drawn to farming? Or do you live on a farm now? Is one a glimmer in your future?

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Farm Report

The blueberries

are ripening. To get any, we almost have to wait among the bushes. As soon as a berry ripens, a bird is leaping to pluck it. The main culprits are mockingbirds, although I watch chickens fling themselves three feet off the ground to snag a blue sphere.

The rest of the fruit

is done. Now we wait for August’s grapes, then fall’s citrus.

The two kumquat trees bloomed this week, and bees swarmed the trees. By week’s end, thousands of small white petals drifted to the ground. Each flower has four petals. The trees appear to be circled by doilies.

Kumquats will be ready by late fall.

The purple martins

have fledged. That is the saddest statement I can make, because my colony is already thinning, probably to pre-migratory roosts nearby. Soon, soon, soon, all of them will head back to Brazil.

One day I came upon a newly fledged martin. It was on the ground at the back porch, unable to fly more than a few feet.

I wasn’t sure at first what it was. Confusing was the fact that it was hundreds of feet from the martin gourds.

But it was a martin, the first I’ve ever seen in any kind of vulnerable state. I was afraid one of the dogs would get it.

I caught it with a piece of flannel. It struggled against my grasp. I transferred it to a basket out of reach of land mammals, but it jumped out and rushed into a flowerbed. It wanted nothing to do with humans.

Someone told me that its parents were nearby, and I think they were. And I think it learned quickly to fly. I never saw it again.

The potatoes

This week’s highlight has been the potato crop. Raven planted potatoes in a 15-foot raised bed. I think he built up the bed, laid whole potatoes (not eyes) out on the soil, then covered it with a thick layer of oat straw.

He harvested 150 pounds from those 15 feet. They should be drying in a cool, dark room, which we don’t have, so they’re on the front porch under a fan. He brought in a pan of the tiniest potatoes, some only 1/2 inch around, and I boiled them, then added butter and chopped parsley. Another day, Raven made his favorite potato salad, with yogurt and lots of garlic, using more of the tiny whole potatoes. It didn’t look like a normal potato salad, but it tasted great.

We’ve eaten many 100 percent meals this week, meaning 100 percent of the food on the plate is from our farm. The percentage, of course, is more like 95%, because we’re not making butter and we don’t have a vein of salt.

The cows

We lost another cow last week, Winona. She was a Jersey we bought as a calf from a dairy. We were raising double-muscle meat cows, Charolais crossed with Piedmontese. We also kept Jersey cows for milk.

Some of the cows became pets. Because the pastures need mowing and because we no longer consider the farm a business—the cows live out their lives.

Winona was somewhere around 16 years old.

We are older. We don’t want to work as hard as we’ve worked in the past. So we are not breeding animals nor replacing them when they’re gone.

The ducks

A neighbor’s dog killed one of our ducks recently. I think Traveler was only playing with the duck, but he’s many times bigger, and the play resulted in death. The neighbor offered to pay for the loss, but the value of a duck is not the same as replacement cost. This hen was a drake’s companion. We enjoyed seeing them at all times of the day, foraging among clover or grasses. They had a routine—who entered the coop first in the evening, who exited first. They had learned to come running when we called a raspy “Quack, quack.”

Money can not pay for that.

We were sad.

We didn’t take our neighbor’s money.

However, Raven and Little Fawn hit the livestock sale in Lyons, Georgia one Saturday, and they came home with two new ducks. Now we have three ducks playing follow-the-leader around the farm.

The eggs

Oh my gosh, my husband, Raven is great at keeping us supplied with eggs. He does this by allowing setting hens to set (three are on nests at the moment) and sometimes by incubating fertile eggs himself.

I’m looking at ten dozen eggs on the counter and more cartons in the refrigerator.

The garlic

can be dug any day. It’s ready. But I doubt we’ll dig and store.

When we need garlic, we run out to the patch and dig some.

The horses

We’re down to a quarterhorse, Lakota, and a mule, Tecumseh. We’ve lost three horses in six months. I’m not going to say any more about it, except that losing a horse is a dreadful thing.

The mule lived in a different pasture with the cows, but Lakota was grief-stricken by the death of his pasture-mates. To keep him alive, we moved the mule over. They seem to get along well.

Today I saw a big dust-storm down in the horse pasture. Tecumseh was rolling around like a puppy in the dirt, creating a big dusty cloud.

The lawn

didn’t grow much all spring because we went deep into a drought.

In mid-May, rain began. Spring ephemerals finished blooming, and with the rain, the grass suddenly was knee high.

Little Fawn is walking now. I can watch for snakes when I wade through yard-grass, but she can’t. When she’d climb out of her stroller to walk around, my heart beat harder.

So I called the man who cuts the grass.

That was the end of May. We almost made it through No-Mow May. We went eight months without mowing.

The cottonmouths

We’ve removed two of them this season.

We catch nonvenomous snakes with our bare hands. If I can find a pair of gloves, I do. I don’t like the smell of snake musk.

We do not handle venomous snakes. So how do we intercept them?

Often, if we place a large metal ashcan, open, in front of them, they will crawl inside, thinking they are crawling to safety. Sometimes, they need to be guided with a pole into the can.

Then we latch the lid and transport them as far away from the farm as we can, find a nice wild place near water, and relocate them. I’m sure some of them manage to get back. We’ve seen snakes that looked awfully similar to snakes we moved only days before. It’s nice to put a river between a snake and our farm, but they swim rivers like rabbits run briar patches.

The first cottonmouth was crossing the yard.

The second was in the garden. While Raven was digging potatoes, he happened to spot it snuggled up in a spiral in the potato bed. I ran for the snake can and he lifted it in, gently, with his shovel.

It now lives somewhere else. Hopefully, it will live a long and happy life in its new home and will never feel a need to return to our rural felicity.

The bats

got counted last week. Two young batwomen from DNR came on Monday and installed the bat monitor. Every June, they collect bat calls, then use the data in a large bat study. Raven happened to work on a fenceline down in that direction and reported that the monitor was in a different location than in past years. The batwomen returned and moved it. I met them—young, energetic, bright-eyed, tattooed—at the end of the week when they retrieved the device.

Phenology

A season of white wildflowers is upon us in the south of Georgia. I took the camera out into the heat, humidity, and swarming gnats of early summer to photograph them. I found nine species.

Small Kindnesses

Recently, I received a thank-you card from someone for whom I did a small favor. The first kindness is that he thanked me with a note. Hand-written. On a pretty card.

In the card—surprise!—was a $2 bill.

He owed me nothing. But I thought the $2 bill was a sweet gesture, a payment that is symbolic, money that’s not really money. That’s the second kindness.

He was thanking me for helping him celebrate the birthday of a friend.

A month earlier, the man had contacted me. “My friend loves your writing,” he wrote, “and I am wondering if you would surprise her with a phone call on her special day.” It seemed important that he tell me she’s a very special person. “She is one of the most amazing people I have ever met in my entire life,” is exactly what he said.

Kindness number three: he imagined a special thing to do for his friend.

“Sure,” I said.

I marked the date on my calendar. When it arrived, I dialed the number. Dang it, I got voice mail. I left a message, with lots of “Happy Birthday!” sprinkled around.

Number four kindness, I did it.

When the thank-you card came, the man told me that my voice message made his friend very happy. He was pleased with how everything had turned out.

He did not owe me a thank-you, as I’ve said. I made the birthday call to keep love flowing.

And now I have a $2 bill to pass on to the baby.

What I’m Reading

How to Be a Rich Old Lady by Amanda Holden. Seriously. I’m trying to learn things I was never taught about money.

What I’m Listening To

• Myself. Reciting Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? to Little Fawn in the dark. Because I’ve read that Dr. Seuss book so many times to her, I’ve memorized it.

• A wood thrush fluting from the deep deciduous woods.

• Podcasts with Amanda Holden. Trying to understand what all the lingo means. Compounding, for example.

Radical Sustainability

Move your money out of banks that finance fossil fuels. Align your investments with your values. One easy thing to do is to bank with a credit union.

Free Book Goes To…

My last two posts were photo essays of a visit by author Chris Fink. I had an extra copy of his short stories, and I offered it up. The first person to say she’d like to read it was Leah Rampy, and the book is on its way to her. Chris will be happy this book has found a good home.

Now on Thursdays

As I mentioned last week, I will be publishing Trackless Wild on Thursdays, rather than Wednesdays. I made the decision purely on the feel of the day. Thursday has always been one of my favorite days, probably because the jump-jiving is about to start.

Happy Weekend on the Way!

I hope you have some happy plans that take you out in nature, because it’s there, waiting, hoping to see you. As am I.

Last week, I opened up my personal photo album documenting a trip with friends to the Altamaha River swamp. One aspect of the trip I did not include, so I am offering it here.

Our friends are the Fink family of Beloit, Wisconsin. Chris is a writer, often about nature, and an English professor. His wife, Breja, teaches high school, and their daughter, whom I’ll call Sunny, is a high school student.

On the buggy ride into the swamp, the land manager, Honeybun, veered off the two-path road.

“I want to show you an interesting tree,” he said.

We arrived at a live oak so thick with burls, knots, burrs, and galls that it appeared to be a strange cross between a prehistoric mammal and a tree.

Maybe it was a reincarnated bison, obstinate and reminiscent, reborn to this southern place. It carried the memory of bison and the sadness of them.

We sat gaping at the creature.

“Want to get out a minute?” Honeybun asked.

All of us piled out of the side-by-side, exclaiming, marveling, starting our slow revolutions around this sterling old specimen.

Sunny had been holding Little Fawn, our young daughter, as we rode. Now I saw Sunny approaching the tree, straining to hold Little Fawn, who weighed twenty pounds, out in front of her. Sunny had a beautiful and determined look on her face.

I realized what she was doing.

No one told her to do it.

She didn’t announce that she was doing it.

She said nothing at all.

She simply approached the tree with determination, holding aloft a small child, offering the tree to the baby,

and offering the baby to the tree.

That the baby touch the tree was important to Sunny.

That the tree feel the baby’s touch was important.

Around the old oak Sunny went, making the offering.

Later, when I looked at the photos, I wept at the beauty and the profundity of it, a girl and a baby and an old, old tree down in the deep woods, giving and receiving a blessing, all of us a little less lonely now that we knew the existence of the other,

all of us touched by something unnameable, extremely rare,

unspeakable.

Part I of the Story

If you would like to experience the rest of the field trip and see the swamps for yourself, here’s Part I.

Coming Up

Many things are happening in the fields and woods around my home in the south of Georgia, USA, including purple martins fledging as the moon wanes from its fullness. Next week—or soon—I will update you on phenology, farm events, small kindnesses, and my other regular Trackless columns. I especially want to tell you what I’ve been reading and listening to. I need fill you in on personal news, as well, none of which is earth-shaking.

Please note that I plan to switch my publication day from Wednesday to Thursday. You will be receiving the next Trackless Wild on Thursday.

Until I meet you again in this wild yonder, be wild, be well, be of good service.

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Although the property begins less than a mile from my farm, I never set foot on it.

Then I got lucky.

I met the land manager. One day, Honeybun, as people call him, and his wife, Angie, knocked on my door. A dog had shown up at their home, and they were trying to figure out where he belonged.

Honeybun is an inch or two taller than me, with broad shoulders. His face is tanned from work outdoors. In the year I’ve known him, I can attest to his generosity, his kind-heartedness, his vision of community. Angie is blonde, friendly and capable, someone you’d want on your team, whether it’s chess or trivia. You won’t meet nicer people.

Honeybun offered to show me the property.

When the (nature) writer and my friend Chris Fink visited in early April with his family, I needed a few excursions for them. I texted Honeybun. “Would you take six of us to see the woods?”

“I’d be happy to give you all a tour,” he said.

You, reading this, won’t be able to see this property, not easily. You won’t see these sights from any road. No public trails will take you down among these trees. So I want to open up the photo album and show you the wild coastal plains of the southern U.S., a strange and fantastical place, mysterious and alluring landscape.

We started in the pine uplands in an all-terrain buggy, threading our way along sloughs, headed south to the Altamaha River a few miles away. (The property is thousands of acres.)

Chris Fink is a tree man. When I worked with him last winter at Beloit College, Wisconsin, where he’s a professor, a few times we walked the campus, looking at trees. He knows trees not only by leaf shape, but also by bark and tree form (round, pyramidal, weeping).

Now he was among millions of trees, trying to identify everything he saw. “Is that a beech?” he’d ask me. “River birch? Red maple?”

Some trees I knew, some I didn’t.

We rode a long time before we got to the river. We’d stop to hop out and look at things. The sloughs got deeper and richer.

Down along the oxbows on this amazing property, cypress trees tower. Bald cypress are often surrounded by knees, thick and tall,

a great unresolved mystery in botany. An article from the Harvard Arnold Arboretum called cypress knees an “enduring enigma.”

Perhaps the knees assist with aeration or oxygen transfer. Perhaps they are supports—anchors. Perhaps they trap sediment or protect trees from the dynamic energies of moving water,

the element that dominates this territory. Although the water has fallen away now, after weeks without rain, water’s presence is recorded on trunks,

high-level marks stained into the bark by potions of concentrated tannin, like bands of gray-brown light.

Finally, we reached the source of these fluvial energies, the grand old Altamaha,

a sedimentary river that starts in the foothills of the Appalachians, where it goes by other names. Two main rivers come down the state of Georgia—the Ocmulgee and the Oconee—and these converge in rural Telfair County, Georgia to become the Altamaha. From The Forks, as it’s called, the river travels 100 miles to the Atlantic Ocean, where it divides into braids that empty around Darien and Brunswick.

In times of drought, such as we’ve had this spring, large sandbars

become exposed along the Altamaha. With little danger of flash flooding, these bars turn into beaches and camping areas.

Sandbars are cuneiformed with the tracks of egrets, herons, rails, bitterns, and wild turkeys. Increasingly, there are wood storks, white ibis, even roseate spoonbills. A bald eagle has been nesting nearby. The skies can whirl with Mississippi and swallow-tailed kites.

Bird life is rich and satisfying.

So is life with friends,

like these

After a lovely hour on the sandy banks of the delicious Altamaha, we piled into Honeybun’s buggy and circled slowly back out of the swamp,

past sloughs thick with old trees, past blooming woodbine and wood violets, leaping deer and running turkeys, a field of Atamasco lilies and a barred owl swiveling its head to grimace at us.

That night we dream of diving so deep into blackwater that we emerge into the vast blue sky on the other side.

I Am Wondering

Is this landscape foreign to you? Or are you intimate with blackwater swamps? Where have you seen one? What wonderful thing has happened to you in one of them?

Leave a comment

Free Copy of Chris Fink Book

I have an extra unsigned hardback copy of Chris’s short story collection Add This To the List of Things That You Are. It is described as “dark and stunning.” Richard Bausch said, “Chris Fink is writing some of the best stories being written today.” I only have one copy, so I can only send this to one person. If you would like it, make a case (in the comments) for it finding a home in your library.

Last Six Days to Register for My Summer Memoir Course

At a glance, the course is:

• All about writing memoir, your own stories, any length work

• Wednesdays 1-2 pm Eastern US/Canada Time

• Weekly for 12 weeks

• Twelve 1-hour sessions on writing structure, technique, and craft

• June 3-Aug. 19, 2026

• Live via Zoom, webinar style (chat is open)

• Recorded

• $300 ($355 if you want the course bundled with Craft & Current and more)

• For beginners to those already published

• Time to write. You’ll have 30+ pieces of your writing by the end of summer

• Pages of useful handouts in pdf format

• Information on printing, binding, & publishing

• Access to online extra Office Hours, Coworking Sessions, Q&As, Guest Speakers, Listening Sessions & Critique Groups

• Honest, authentic interest in your story & belief in you

Session dates are June 3 / June 10 / June 17 / June 24 / July 1 / July 8 / July 15 / July 22 / July 29 / Aug. 5 / Aug. 12 / Aug. 19.

An Open Mic Night is currently set for Thursday, Aug. 20, 2026, at 6 pm ET.

It’s important to know that participant numbers are not limited in Memoir Summer. Each of the twelve sessions is webinar-style, designed to save you time. I am the only one speaking. I pack the hour with writing prompts, exercises, good information, advice, inspiration, and challenges. This eliminates “light” activities like introductions or questions that have no bearing on your needs.

You are encouraged to set a goal and commit to a time to write outside course sessions.

The goal is getting your stories down on the page, as many pages as needed, as many pages as possible.

I offer lots of additional optional sessions that are interactive, community-building, for smaller numbers of writers, and part of the course.

Memoir Summer is $300. I’ve taught memoir-writing for over 30 years. I’ve helped writers write better, be happier with their work, get clear on their goals, find agents, publish essays, publish books, self-publish, and much more.

However, I do not advise taking my course..

• if you plan to go into debt to pay for it

• if you think you can quickly recoup this investment

• if you need a small-group setting to learn

• if you’re really wanting to write something other than memoir

• if you don’t trust that I can help you.

Otherwise, I’m your guide. I’m here for your idea, your project, your book, your creativity.

At this link, you’ll find more information and registration.

Memoir Summer

Thank You

Thank you for your continued support of my writing and writing life. I’ll see you back here next Wednesday afternoon. Have a great start of summer.

I watch her walk. This is the most amazing thing. She is almost 22 months old, and for 22 months she has been unable to walk. Now, she passes a recliner and a loveseat, never reaching out, sure-footed and steady.

“Walk, walk!” she says, gleefully. A whole new world has opened to her. She is walking around like a big person. She can cross a room in seconds. She can walk in one direction, pivot, then head in another. She can dance on her own two feet.

I’m grinning at her, she’s grinning back. My natural state, I am sorry to say, is not happiness. But I think happiness is my child’s natural state.

“Want a yoga mat?” I ask. I have two, and I slide one off for her.

She stops at the purple mat, strikes a posture similar to a downward dog, and lifts one leg in the air. I laugh.

But it’s huge. It’s probably something I didn’t get enough of, maybe didn’t get at all—soft eyes smiling at me.

My delight with my child is written all over my face. Her delight is imprinted on hers.

I pull up a music playlist called “Prayers and Offerings.” On her feet again, the baby begins to wiggle, her way of dancing. I set a timer for fifteen minutes and start my first salutation, facing east. When I bend, the baby steps toward me, grinning. Upside down, I smile. I hug her. I kiss both cheeks.

“Mmmmm,” she says, pressing her lips together and putting them to my face.

[Note: Very personal essays, especially these about raising a baby in my sixties, are paywalled. This is the point at which only paying subscribers may continue reading. I intentionally choose this option for the sake of privacy. If you wish to subscribe in order to stay with me, please understand that Substack’s policy is to auto-renew. You will need to find and turn off auto-renewal. Also, for these paywalled posts, only paid subscribers may comment. That, too, is Substack’s policy, not my own. Thank you for being here.]

Read more

The secret could be a sentence, a drawing, a confession, a dream, a hope. These were to be mailed to me without name, return address, or any identifying evidence.

I posted the Wild Confessions in installments of ten.

Installment #1 can be found here.

Installment #2 is here.

Below you’ll find a gallery of the final postcards I received. The side with the message is first, followed by the postcard image. I have typed the handwritten messages.

(1)

My secret. I am afraid of the dark.

(2)

I still love him.

(3)

I never imagined I’d end up so completely alone.

(4)

I used to yell at God and demand he come down and fight me—

Now I am finally a mom.

My deepest fear is that He knew I couldn’t handle it—or I’m not a good mom—

& now what have I done?

I love my daughter &

I’m ashamed & scared that I’ve written this down.

(5)

I believe we have all been given an open invitation to the Second Coming by the Buddhist monks walking for peace.

Thank You

Many thanks to the people who took the time to send in a postcard. I am deeply grateful.

Follow-ups

🦬 Copies of Acres USA Are Still Available—I’m mailing bundles of the magazine Acres USA, a fine publication about regenerative agriculture, to K.D. Morgan, Trillium Meeks, and Emmie Golding, who happens to work for The Conservation Fund's Farms Fund program. Did I miss anyone? If you’d like a few random ag magazines to read, let me know. The time has come to pass these on.

🦬 Craft & Current Is Mailed—I found a copy of Craft & Current: A Manual for Magical Writing mis-signed to “Vicki.” In a private message, Mike Strong of Colorado requested the book to surprise his cousin, Vicki, “who happens to love writing and would really appreciate the inspiration.” Then Vicki Williams of Virginia said she could use the book. Luckily, I had a second copy that had a paper fold on the frontispiece. Both books are on the way.

🦬 Where To See Longleaf Pine Forests—Thank you sincerely to all who made suggestions to the guide, “Where To See Longleaf Pine Forests.” I’ll be revising soon, and I will let you know when I pin the post to the top of the Trackless Wild page.

🦬 Tree Bill—On Earth Day, I posted a Tree Bill under the heading “Let’s Write Legislation Together.” When I get the bill revised, I’ll repost. Thanks to all who have offered ideas.

🦬 Consider Summer Memoir—If a desire to write your own story keeps you up at night, consider taking a memoir-writing course I’m offering this summer. We start in three weeks. I offer you solid creative and technical information, guidance, mindset assistance, accountability, and community. The basic sessions are one hour a week, Wednesdays, 1 pm Eastern. There are lots more opportunities to meet up and work, but the core sessions are an hour a week. Sessions recorded. Beginners encouraged. Tuition is $300.

🦬 Memoir Coupon Code for Funding Subscribers—If you wish to enroll in the memoir-writing course with me, I offer you a coupon for $55 off tuition. I can send it to you privately. I would love to work with you in Memoir Summer 2026.

🦬 Check Your Auto-Renew—Recently, I received this note: “Hi, Janisse. I just noticed a recurring credit card payment of $33 posted to my checking account on 4/29. I honestly don’t recall ordering or subscribing to anything. Any information or insight would be appreciated. Thanks, C.” Periodically, I remind you that one of Substack’s business practices is auto-renewals. A year ago, C. subscribed to Trackless Wild. If you subscribe to this newsletter at the $33/year level, Substack will renew you in a year. I am not a proponent of this system. I believe a person should decide each and every time if and how they wish to spend their money. You may want to check each of your Substack subscriptions. You are able to turn off auto-renew. Go into “Settings” and toggle it off. When I myself subscribe to a Substack, I often subscribe, pay my annual subscription, then immediately turn off auto-renew. I support some Substacks year after year, but always I want to decide.

Eric’s question encouraged me to create a guide to accessible longleaf pine forests. This guide will be a living, crowd-sourced document. If you have personal, on-the-ground information about one of these sites that I should add, be in touch. If you would like to see a different site on this list, let me know.

Where To Experience Longleaf Pine Forests

Longleaf is an iconic landscape that once covered over 90 million acres of the uplands of the southeastern U.S. The ecosystem was 99 percent destroyed by clearcutting, development, and pine plantations. America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative is a rangewide effort to restore the ecosystem.

If you experience a mature (or near old-growth) longleaf pine ecosystem, you’ll get to see an iconic landscape that built a country. Often in these forests, conservation and fire have partnered for decades, sometimes centuries. Old-growth longleaf is now exceedingly rare, but mature stands can be found across longleaf’s historic range.

Here are some of the best places—arranged by state and chosen for ecological integrity, presence of older trees, and visitor access.

Look For

• towering, widely spaced pines

• wiregrass understories

• groundcover diversity

• an open, park-like quality

• cathedral light

• red-cockaded woodpecker cavity trees

• gopher tortoise burrows

• old “wolf trees” with broad crowns

• and so much more.

Tips for Visiting

Best time: Spring (March–May) for wildflower blooms in the wiregrass understory, or fall for cooler hiking.

Look closely at things. Stay quiet. Listen. Move slowly.

Avoid ticks at all costs. Wear long pants, light-colored if possible. Wear closed-toed shoes. Tuck pants into socks. Use powerful insect repellent to avoid ticks. Spray boots and hat.

Watch for snakes, of course.

Some sites are remote and can be out of cell range. Download maps and directions ahead of time.

Check current weather conditions before visiting.

Take water.

Safety: Do not go alone. Recent attacks on women have shown that even two women (or two men) may not be safe enough. Protect yourself by going in a group or by carrying weaponry of some kind. Know how to use bear spray, if that’s your protection. Pay attention to your surroundings, to other people in the area or to any kind of suspicious behavior. We can’t afford for you to be injured or traumatized in any way. If you suffer, we all suffer.

🌲🥾🌼FLORIDA☀️💚🌲

Eglin Air Force Base

Florida Panhandle

• one of the largest intact longleaf landscapes remaining anywhere in the world

• tens of thousands of acres

• excellent older stands

• requires recreation permit, but access is possible

🌲

Apalachicola National Forest

Sumatra, FL

• fire-maintained landscapes with beautiful structure

• vast and wild, with pockets of older longleaf

• extensive longleaf flatwoods and rare wet savannas

• incredible pitcher plant bogs

• Closer to Tallahassee, the Munson Hills trail system is particularly accessible.

🌲

Blackwater River State Forest

Milton, Florida

• well-maintained trails, campgrounds, and easy hiking along the Blackwater River corridor

• some very mature longleaf stands

• clear, sandy understories and frequent burns

• quiet (I hope)

🌲

Topsail Hill Preserve State Park

Santa Rosa Beach, FL

• stunning coastal longleaf park with old-growth trees, rare scrub communities, and tram access for those with mobility limitations

• one of the most wheelchair-accessible longleaf sites

🌲

Longleaf Pine Preserve

Volusia County

• 12,000+ acres with extensive trails

🌲

Disney Wilderness Preserve

Orlando, FL

• a major Nature Conservancy restoration site

🌲

Tall Timbers Research Station

North of Tallahassee, FL, near the Georgia/Florida line

• private research station. Watch for opportunities to visit.

🌲🥾🌼GEORGIA☀️💚🌲

Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge

Folkston, GA

• upland edges of the Okefenokee feature mature longleaf

• the refuge is one of the most biodiverse places in the Southeast

• see the swamp while you’re there

🌲

Moody Forest Natural Area

Baxley, GA

• 200–300-year-old longleaf pines

• habitat for red-cockaded woodpeckers

🌲

Ohoopee Dunes State Natural Area

Emanuel County, GA

• “Georgia’s Desert”

• significant sand dune-longleaf pine ecosystems

• see fabulous botany

🌲

Reed Bingham State Park

Adel/Moultrie, GA

• protected longleaf stands

• excellent for spotting gopher tortoises, the state reptile

🌲

F.D. Roosevelt State Park

Pine Mountain, GA

• montane longleaf pines along the Pine Mountain Ridge

🌲

Doe Run Pitcher Plant Bog Natural Area

Colquitt County, GA

• Pine savanna with unique bog habitats (I’ll be doing a dedicated list of places to experience pitcher plant bogs)

🌲

Hofwyl-Broadfield Plantation Historic Site

Brunswick, GA

• coastal longleaf birding spot

🌲

Fort King George Historic Site

Darien, GA

• coastal longleaf forest

🌲

Crooked River State Park

St. Marys, GA

• coastal longleaf habitat

• great camping, trails, and views of Crooked River

🌲

Oaky Woods Wildlife Management Area

Houston County, GA

• large, managed wildlife area

🌲

Chickasawhatchee Wildlife Management Area

Southwest GA

• known for restoration efforts

🌲

Wade Tract Preserve

Thomas County, GA, near Thomasville

• privately owned forest, not publicly accessible

• outstanding old-growth longleaf pine-wiregrass

• watch for opportunities to visit

🌲

Ichauway (Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center)

Baker County, near Newton, GA

• private research station

• watch for opportunities to visit

🌲🥾🌼SOUTH CAROLINA☀️💚🌲

Francis Marion National Forest

north of Charleston, SC

• coastal longleaf system with history and resilience

• Heavily impacted by Hurricane Hugo, recovering

• some mature stands mixed with regeneration

🌲

Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge

McBee, SC

• classic sandhills longleaf ecosystem

• red-cockaded woodpecker colonies

• easy wildlife drive access

• excellent for families

🌲

Hitchcock Woods

Aiken, SC

• 2,000+ acres right in town

• easy access, sandy trails

• surprisingly wild for urban location

• good for walking quietly among old trees.

🌲

Camden Battlefield and Longleaf Pine Preserve

near Camden, SC

• trails through classic habitat

• layered with Revolutionary War history

🌲🥾🌼NORTH CAROLINA☀️💚🌲

Weymouth Woods Sandhills Nature Preserve

Southern Pines, NC

• one of the best publicly accessible places to see older longleaf

• truly gorgeous, exceptional park

• easy trails through classic habitat

• some trees 150–200+ years old

• home to a 475+ year-old tree. Watch for the annual birthday party for this tree.

• highly recommended

🌲

Fort Bragg (now Fort Liberty)

Fayetteville, NC

• one of the largest intact longleaf landscapes left.

• extensive mature stands due to use of frequent fire

• critical habitat for red-cockaded woodpeckers

• access can be tricky, but scientifically significant

🌲

Sandhills Game Lands

Southern Pines and Pinehurst, NC

• as stronghold of longleaf restoration with increasingly mature stands

• habitat for red-cockaded woodpeckers

• beautiful, open pine savannas

🌲

Uwharrie National Forest

Troy, NC

• contains about 2,300 acres of habitat

• includes the Pleasant Grove pine savanna

🌲

Croatan National Forest

New Bern, NC

• coastal longleaf

• exceptional carnivorous plant diversity in the savannas

• The Neusiok Trail winds through mature stands.

• known for historic “cat-faced” trees showing past resin harvesting

🌲

Green Swamp Preserve

Supply, NC

• one of the most botanically rich longleaf systems anywhere.

• not towering old-growth, but deeply mature in structure

• extraordinary wiregrass and carnivorous plant diversity

• feels ancient

• significant longleaf savanna habitat

  

🌲🥾🌼ALABAMA☀️💚🌲

Conecuh National Forest

Evergreen, AL

• crown jewel of longleaf restoration, large-scale longleaf recovery

• gorgeous mature stands

• open wire-grass understory

• a great network of hiking and biking trails

• a mix of restoration and maturing forest, increasingly impressive structure

🌲

Talladega National Forest

Oakmulgee/Shoal Creek Districts, Fort McClellan and Anniston

• prime spot for mountain longleaf pine

• Dugger Mountain Wilderness includes mature stands at higher elevation

• very unusual for the species

🌲

Splinter Hill Bog

Perdido, AL

• managed by The Nature Conservancy

• famous for carnivorous plant diversity

• pitcher plants carpet the ground beneath longleaf canopy

• open for public visits

🌲

Solon Dixon Forestry Education Center

Escambia County, AL (Auburn University)

• publicly accessible

• specifically designed for forest education

• beautiful mature longleaf stands and interpretive signage

🌲

Geneva State Forest

Kinston, AL

• large state forest with 7,200 acres

🌲

Cheaha State Park

Delta, AL

• scenic mountain longleaf views

🌲🥾☀️MISSISSIPPI🌼💚🌲

De Soto National Forest

Hattiesburg, MS

• thousands of acres of longleaf

• the Black Creek Wilderness

• Black Creek Trail is Mississippi’s only National Scenic Trail.

🌲🥾🌼LOUISIANA☀️💚🌲

Kisatchie National Forest

Central Louisiana

• patches of older trees

• restoration

• Kisatchie Hills Wilderness features beautiful mature longleaf on rolling sandstone hills

• scenery unlike anywhere in the coastal plain

🌲🥾🌼TEXAS☀️💚🌲

Big Thicket National Preserve

Near Warren, TX

• at the western fringe, where longleaf mingles with hardwoods

• remnant longleaf stands

• ecologically complex, almost primeval in feel

• important for range-wide perspective

• walk the 1-mile Longleaf Pine Trail in the Turkey Creek Unit to see a young longleaf pine

🌲

Angelina National Forest

Boykin Springs, Zavalla, TX

• East Texas longleaf pine with pitcher plant bogs

• Boykin Springs area has 5.5 miles of trails through forests and bogs

• a highlight of the Texas Longleaf Tour

🌲🥾🌼OKLAHOMA☀️💚🌲

McCurtain County Wilderness Area

SE Oklahoma

• westernmost stronghold of significant longleaf forest

• remote but accessible by trail

• a wild experience

While You Are There

1. Pick up five pieces of human-made debris and take it out with you.

2. Take off your shoes and walk around on pine needles.

3. Read aloud Rumi’s poem that includes the line “Let the beauty we love be what we do.”

My Three Favorites

1. Moody Forest (closest to my home and the longleaf I visit most often)

2. Weymouth Woods (a glorious step back in time)

3. Splinter Hill (truly incredible, very rural bog)

Other Resources

Places to See Longleaf Pine in Texas

This map shows where longleaf pine still exists in SC, NC, and VA. It was developed by NC Forest Service, SC Forestry Commission, and VA Dept. of Forestry.

Here’s a guided tour of Alabama’s Longleaf, produced by USDA and the Longleaf Alliance.

https://floridahikes.com/national-forests/

Heritage Preserves in SC

The Longleaf Alliance

Can You Ground-Truth Any of These Sites?

Please let me know any on-the-ground info you know about any of these sites, including particular trails or specific things to see. Thank you so much.

Leave a comment

Be well, be wild, be of good service.

The Big Wildfires

The past few weeks have been disastrous in the coastal plains of Georgia, where I live. The entire region is in a drought. Farther south, toward the Florida line, the drought is extreme.

We’re in an official State of Emergency. People have been calling and texting to check on us. We’re fine. We’re safe. Thank you.

The big fires you’re seeing on national news are 1-2 hours south of us.

The Highway 82 Fire

This morning, according to the app Watch Duty, the wildfire originating in Brantley County, Georgia, is 22,600 acres, 32 percent contained. Evacuations have moved into nearby counties of Wayne and Glynn.

The Pineland Road Fire

The wildfire that started in Clinch County, Georgia is 32,500 acres, 23 percent contained.

Crews from all over the region and nation are fighting the blazes with

• water from both tankers and helicopters

• fire retardant

• containment lines (firebreaks)

• back-burning (setting fires, when possible, that move backwards toward a main fireline, in order to reduce fuel in the path of the fire)

• hotspot checks in already burned areas, to prevent re-ignition

The Burned Homes

Miraculously, no one has died. About 150 homes have been destroyed in the Brantley fire, although that number changes often.

The Documentation

My friend Wayne Morgan is an nature art photographer from Brantley County. Usually he takes photos of nature’s beauty, but this week he has been documenting wildfires. He gave me permission to include these three photos.

This is Wayne’s photo of the Little Satilla River. It has shrunk to a trickle. See that gorgeous tannic water?

The Front Lines

All the information I’m showing you can be found online. Lots of organizations are on the ground, including the Red Cross, FEMA, Georgia State Patrol, Georgia Forestry Commission, and county response agencies. Local churches are open for evacuees.

The Drought

I’m not sure how many weeks or months have passed since rain last fell. I read a report that south Georgia has only received four inches of rain this year. We’re a place that would get, if we weren’t in an atmospheric crisis, sixty inches annually.

I live on a farm, as you know. We have a deep well and a large water tank. When plants begin to suffer, we start watering. Over the years we’ve lived here—almost twenty now—we’ve installed a complex system of spigots, hoses, water lines, and sprinklers. For weeks now, we have watered on rotation to keep fruit trees and garden plants alive.

Also, we save plastic jugs for times like this, and for weeks we’ve filled and refilled them. Little Fawn and I ride around on the electric golf cart, pouring gallons of water on plants I see suffering.

In this southern place, droughts happen. I remember dry times when I was a child, how people would organize prayer meetings to pray for rain. Those words, in fact, have crossed many pairs of lips lately. “Pray for rain.”

The current drought, however, is a different beast. The heat is different. The air is different.

How do I describe it?

The air of southern Georgia carries a thirst that you feel sucking at you, sucking at leaves, sucking at the ground. This is a thirsty air. I step outside, into that hot, dry, sucking atmosphere around me, and I think, This is a sirocco. Almost every day I say that.

Even when rain falls—let’s say 1/2 inch—within 24 hours the earth appears desperately dry again. Dry topsoil has become the norm.

When it doesn’t rain, fire—that tool we humans have used so well—becomes monstrous.

Hundreds of fires have broken out or gotten loose across my region in the last couple of months. Fires can pop up anywhere, and they do, and the local units rush to extinguish them before they become something major.

If you missed it, I wrote last week about a wildfire in my neighborhood.

We’re in the first regionwide mandatory fire ban ever.

The Causes

1. The climate crisis is desertifying my region. All the climate models show that life is going to get rough here in the southeastern U.S. The most devastating effects of climate change—extreme heat, drought, inland flooding, wildfires, and coastal flooding—are going to hit here hardest.

   If you’re looking for a climate refuge, the place where I live is not it.

2. My region is the woodbasket for the nation. It has lost the tree cover and shade that helps the earth retain moisture. When an entire region uses its forests like piggy banks…when people have no concern for what forests should be like and turn them into moneymaking machines…when forestry practices convert the woods into boxes of matches, then you get disaster.

The Rain

When I walked across the dogtrot before dawn this morning, starting the day, I heard a sighing sound all around. I stopped, stood, waited. The sound grew until, yes, light rain began. I moved down the steps, out from under the roof, to feel the first pinpricks of water on my arms.

We didn’t get much, less than 1/4 inch. But it was enough to moisten the ground, relieve the parched vegetation, and prepare the soil for the larger rains forecast for this weekend.

FURTHERMORE…

Where Is the Safest Place To Live in the U.S.?

The climate crisis is altering the planet dramatically and rapidly. No place is spared. Our places are affected differently at different times, with

• less rain

• more rain

• more intense rain, causing erosion, floods, and crop loss

• hotter temperatures, including agricultural fields drying out more quickly

• heat waves

• wildfires

• smoke-filled air

• coastal flooding due to rising seas and rain events

• the drifting of seasons, resulting in crop loss

• more storms

• more violent storms

More than 2.4 million people have watched a YouTube video called “THIS Is the Safest Place to Live in the US as the Climate Changes.” There are 8.3k comments. That’s shocking. Millions of people now understand, fear, and prepare for the climate crisis. Yet, most of our institutions, led by capitalists, pretend that all is well or all will be well or a solution will be found.

Speaking of the safest place, the video features a county in Vermont rated as the most secure. However, many folks in the comments pointed out intense and destructive flooding in that very county, proving that, indeed, no place is exempt.

We need rapid and sweeping

1. political buy-in

2. policy changes (I mean twenty years ago), and

3. course-correction on a cultural level, far beyond victory gardens and Earth Day celebrations

How Safe Is Your Place?

In 2022, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration prepared state summaries of the effects of climate destabilization. These can be found at “State Climate Summaries.” Click on your state, if you’re in the U.S.

Ruggedize Your Life

Alex Steffen, in online classes and in his Substack The Snap Forward, looks at how folks might survive the climate crisis. Start here with Steffen’s post “Ruggedize Your Life: Why smart choices about where and how you live are the key to surviving and thriving in a planetary crisis.”

I have not taken a course with Alex, so I can’t recommend one personally. However, this is a subject I intend to think more about. I’ll be talking about it in the weeks to come.

On the Farm

👩‍🌾 The cows have been getting out. They want green grass, and the pastures never greened up following the dry brownness of winter. Of course, we’re still feeding hay, but the cows prefer green grass. Raven has spent days riding fence, sawing trees and limbs off, and restringing wires. I tell Raven to let the cows go, I’m tired of them, but he goes off into the woods, calling them up, “C’mon, girrrrls.” And soon the cows are coming home, dragging their tails behind them. “Girrrrls” is Little Fawn’s newest word.

👩‍🌾 Mulberries are ripe, but we won’t even enjoy a mulberry pie this year. The birds are desperate for berries. An earful of cedar waxwings has descended, and as long as the mulberries last, the birds will remain. Their high-pitched squeaking makes me think I’m living alongside the Oregon Trail, listening to the screaks of wagon wheels. Although we’ve given up on a pavlova, we do walk to the tree a few times a day and pick a few, a taste for us and Little Fawn. That really gets the wagons moving!

👩‍🌾 Because of the mulberry trees, laundry needs to be brought inside as soon as it’s dry. Birds poop a lot, apparently, when they’re flying over clotheslines.

👩‍🌾 The goumi bush is full of fruit. That’s the baby’s favorite.

👩‍🌾 The purple martins are as busy as can be. I’m guessing they have babies.

I Hope You Write Memoir With Me This Summer

Because I’m parenting a little one, I’m only teaching two writing courses this entire year.

Starting in June, running through summer, I'll be teaching a memoir writing course. If you are interested in writing memoir of any length—flash, essay, family notebook, or book—I invite you to join me.

The course consists of a session each week, one hour on Wednesdays at 1 pm Eastern, taught online, live via Zoom. Sessions are recorded if you can’t make a class. I’ve arranged other sessions for coworking, Q&As, or guest speakers. Guest writers are Kelly McMasters, Kathryn Wilder, Jeanne Malmgren, and Michelle Dowd.

My goal is to help you get stories on the page. That's it. Stories on paper.

Experience level is beginner to already published. Goals range from collecting a few stories for your family to publishing a book-length memoir.

I could tell you more, but the best thing is to go to my website. Tuition is $300.

I'm Interested in Writing Memoir

Did You Hear About the DNA Anthology?

This is a spectacular collection of 29 essays I’ve helped put together about people

• who found absent fathers and other unknown blood relatives

• who had to rewrite their origin stories

• whose lives were upended by DNA results

• who learned buried secrets and unexpected truths

If you want to make sure you get a copy of the book, you need to do it through the Kickstarter launch. I cannot guarantee a copy any other way. The pre-launch page is up. We should go live by June 1 and run for a couple of weeks. To make sure you hear about the launch, go to the pre-launch page and click the button “Notify me on launch.”

Notify Me on Launch

Who Helped Make the DNA Book?

The book is co-edited by Hilary Vidalakis and copyedited by M.K. Creel. Cover designer is Peter S. Elgin.

The work of thirty writers is featured in the book:

✍️ A.B. Rowell ✍️ Alana Edwards ✍️ Ann Hite ✍️ Beth Cleary ✍️ Cate Hurlbut ✍️ Chelsea D. Hillyer ✍️ David Gallipoli ✍️ Dorette E. Snover ✍️ Erin McAllester ✍️ Frances B. Stephan ✍️ Gabriela MacKee ✍️ Gail Krueger ✍️ Helena Hubl ✍️ Joy Ramirez ✍️ Karen Salyer McElmurray ✍️ Kathy Conway ✍️ Kelli Nicole Bivins ✍️ Kory Wells ✍️ Laura Dennis ✍️ Leeanne R. Hay ✍️ Lisa Harris ✍️ Lindsay Kolasa ✍️ M.K. Creel ✍️ Marilyn Moriarty ✍️ Mary Dansak ✍️ Mary Tebo ✍️ Maxine Smith ✍️ Niles Reddick ✍️ Rhonda Mullen ✍️ Shirley Harris ✍️

The paperback will sell for $20, the hardback for $30, and the ebook for $10. We will not be offering an audiobook.

I'm Pretty Sure I Want the DNA Book

Happy Full Moon

Elderberries have started to bloom in the wetter bottomlands, so I’m calling this full moon, which happens Friday, May 1, the Elder Blossom Moon.

One More Photo of the Big Wildfire

This photo was taken by Kyle Morgan, travel and nature photographer from Brunswick, Georgia. I saw the photo on Kyle’s Facebook page, and I found it absolutely stunning. You can see his incredible work at his website and on Instagram @k.morganartistry

Other days, I know we’re losing it all.
*

Some days, deep in drought, I watch for wildfires.

Other days, I see smoke. Or, like this morning, smell it.
*

Some days, I walk imagining the year is 1726. Those magnificent forests!

Other days, I feel the trees suffering.

*

Some days, I spot a single pine that has given up and died.

Other days, I spot others.

*

Some days, I wonder why I feel their pain.

Other days, I focus on a hummingbird in the woodbine.

*

Some days are thick with grief.

Others, it’s only pollen, seeping through the cracks around the doors.

*

Some days I wish I’d never read Bartram’s travelogue.

Other days I wish I’d never learned what the world used to be like.

*

Some days, for example, I enjoy remembering Carolina parakeets.

Others days, not so much.

*

Some days, I want to see more snakes and birds.

Every day, to be honest, I want to see more.

*

Some days, I know my work has not saved the world.

Other days, I tell myself, Keep trying.

*

Some days I start seeds.

Other days, I water them.

*

Some days, I celebrate the Earth.

Other days, I celebrate the Earth.

Get Your Free Ebook

To celebrate Earth Day, my first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, is absolutely free for ebook download.

To get the book, go to my website and order. The cost is marked $0. You will not be charged anything.

Ebooks are fulfilled via BookFunnel, and you should get an email almost immediately with your download link. BookFunnel supports all reading devices.

Get Your Free Book Here

Wildfires Burning in Southern Georgia

On April 8, a wildfire broke out less than a mile from our farm.

At 1 p.m., my neighbor William, arriving home after a physical therapy appointment, noticed smoke. He found a stand of his 7-year-old loblolly pines afire. He called 911, but by the time tankers arrived and were able to spray water, the fire had spread to a neighbor’s land.

Forestry officials believe that a prescribed burn from three weeks earlier had reignited.

Another neighbor saw firetrucks rushing past his house, red lights flashing. Willard called to ask if we were okay. We thanked him for the alert.

We’ve had no rain all spring, and everything is terribly dry.

White smoke billowed into the sky to the west of our farm. The wind was high, 25 miles an hour. Raven, my husband, checked the wind direction, and lucky for us, the wind was blowing from the east. It would be pushing the fire away from us.

We have installed very large sprinklers for watering the orchard and the gardens. Now, to be safe, we turned on water sprinklers on the west side of the house. We moved our cars in case emergency vehicles needed to get in. We made sure hoses around the house were attached and ready to operate.

Then we went out to see if we could get a handle on what was happening.

The local fire department had already posted on social media. They called the incident a “brush fire.”

When I saw the fire, I knew it couldn’t honestly be termed a brush fire. It was a wildfire, possibly even a firestorm.

Neighbors were out with harrows, desperately cutting firebreaks. One was trying to save his seven chicken houses and his shop, where two large fuel tanks had been filled the day before. State patrol offices and sheriff deputies were closing roads, rerouting traffic. Firetrucks and tankers from surrounding towns and counties were joining the ranks. Forestry’s plane was in the air, flying around and around, apparently communicating with firefighters on the ground. A helicopter with a bucket came in.

We gathered with neighbors at an intersection near where the fire was raging.

It was an humbling experience. A prescribed and permitted burn from three weeks earlier had flared. The wind was aggressive. My guess is that 200 workers had been dispatched to this “brush fire.”

At the end of the day, the fire was mostly contained.

“This is a taste of what’s to come,” I said.

Two Major Wildfires Burn Unconfined

As of this morning, two fires have engulfed thousands of acres in south Georgia. Both are only 10 percent contained.

One is in Brantley County, where 60 homes have been lost. It involves 9,000 acres at the moment, although that number changes constantly.

The other is on the west side of Okefenokee Swamp, in Clinch and Echols Counties. It has grown to 16,000 acres. Yesterday, a sheriff deputy (who came to tell us that our mule was out of the pasture and on the road) said that the fire has moved across the state line, into northern Florida.

The air is smoke-filled as far north as Atlanta.

Forestry Practices Have Created a Tinderbox Down Here

America’s forestry practices in the South have created conditions for disaster.

To understand this, you have to know that historic longleaf pine forests were known for

• widely spaced trees of all ages and sizes

• an understory of low-growing grasses and herbs that were fire-tolerant or fire-adapted

• slow-moving, wide-ranging fires, often the product of natural lightning strikes

• the use of burning by native inhabitants and by immigrant settlers.

What we do now to southern forests:

1. We clearcut entire forests. Sometimes, we replant and leave the saplings to grow. Underbrush grows alongside the young trees, creating impassible forests that look and act more like thickets. In dry and windy conditions, these thickets are ripe for uncontrolled fires.

2. We clearcut entire forests and do not replant. The underbrush creates low, dense thickets of vegetation that become fire havens in drought.

3. In many areas, invasive exotics like privet (Ligustrum) create dense, flammable non-forests.

4. We have suppressed prescribed burning as a management tool for generations.

5. Timber companies are often large landholdings that utilize the pitiful practices listed above. Their pine plantations take up thousands of acres of poorly managed timberland highly susceptible to wildfire.

I write about southern forests—as they were and as they are—in my first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. If you haven’t read it, the ebook is free this week.

Get Your Free Copy of ECOLOGY

Let’s Write Legislation Together

A thought occurred to me the other day. We need a Tree Bill, to go hand-in-hand with a major Climate Bill. Let’s write one. Help me, please. What shall we put into this Tree Bill?

I’ll get us started.

1. Americans who maintain trees around their home get a tax break of $100/year per tree over 6 inches in diameter at breast height (dbh), up to $1,000.

2. Landowners who restore acres of their land to native ecosystems, protected by conservation easements, receive substantial rebates.

3. A National Tree Ordinance. No tree may be cut without a harvesting permit, similar to alligator hunting.

4. Funding for administrators around the country to supervise permitting for tree cutting.

5. On-the-ground teams nationwide who prescribe-burn for landowners for free, given safe conditions and fire-tolerant landscapes.

6. …

In the Comments

Please help create a Tree Bill. I invite you to add your ideas, edits, suggestions, and questions.

Happy Earth Day!

Wherever you are, in whatever part of the world, however you are loving the Earth, I wish you a happy Earth Day.

Imagine those checks we wrote supporting national parks, wildlife refuges, and national forests. Imagine them funding tree-planting and other climate solutions.

Turn Your Stories Into Memoir This Summer

This summer, I’ll be teaching Summer Memoir, which is a summer experience in writing your own life stories. Is memoir calling you?

Stories Bind Us

Last Saturday evening, I invited a few close neighbors over for supper. The gathering had no advance planning, only some quick texts in the morning to see who might be free at evening. We ended up with six adults and a baby.

After everyone left, my husband Raven and I analyzed the conversation. The majority of it consisted of stories about our shared and not-so-shared history here. Raven and I are newer on the scene, having moved to this quiet country place only fifteen years ago. My neighbors told stories of hurricanes, drunk fishermen, mean women, a church-going lady deciding who would inherit her pearls when she died, land divisions, grown children struggling with identity…

Why is this important?

My job is story-writing. I look for good stories, and I try to write them down in such a way that the writing does justice to the story.

Of course, I’m drawn to stories about nature. But that doesn’t have to be your focus.

Details re: Summer Memoir

• Level: Beginner to Intermediate

• Weekly for 12 weeks

• Wednesdays 1-2 pm Eastern US/Canada Time

• June 3-Aug. 19, 2026

• Live via Zoom

• Participant numbers not limited

• Session dates: June 3 / June 10 / June 17 / June 24 / July 1 / July 8 / July 15 / July 22 / July 29 / Aug. 5 / Aug. 12 / Aug. 19

• Open Mic Night

Stories Are Glue

Sometimes, I think that stories are the glue for our entire culture. Sure, books are nice, but books are simply a way to package up the stories.

What Kind of Memoir Would You Write?

• your life story

• something that happened to you

• family stories you’ve been told

• some particular part of your life

• your relationship with nature

• wild things you’ve done

• wild places you’ve seen

• wild adventures

• the stories you know about your place

• things your grandchildren need to know

What Form Could It Take?

• a book

• an essay

• a long letter

• a series of letters

• flash memoirs (each one is short)

• a chapbook

• a photo album heavy on words

Can I Help You Do It?

I can’t do it for you. I can’t make you do it.

I can inspire you and teach you how to have fun at it and send you off each week with some new idea to experiment with and ask you to write every day and provide lots of opportunities to write.

What You Get

• A summer semester spent writing

• Twelve 1-hour sessions

• A lesson concerning memoir each session, including guidance on writing structure, technique, and craft

• An engaging class that you look forward to all week

• Recordings of the sessions if you have to miss one

• 30+ pieces of in-class writing by the end of the summer

• Writing prompts

• Pages of important, useful handouts in pdf form

• Link to a Google Drive where handouts, readings, & recordings are posted

• Honest, authentic interest in your story

• Honest, authentic belief in you

• Opportunities to ask questions

• Information on printing, binding, & publishing

• Engagement with other writers

• Access to online Office Hours, Coworking Sessions, Q&As, Guest Speakers, Live Editing, & Critique Groups

• A chance to read your work in an online Open Mic Night, currently set for Thursday, Aug. 20, 2026, 6 pm Eastern Time

• A receipt to file with your taxes, if you have writing income

Your Investment

• $300

• an hour in session each week

• at least 1 additional hour at your desk

• a receipt to file with taxes if you have writing income

a sincere desire to get your stories down on paper

Or Choose the Bundle

I’ve also bundled the course with my writing manual, Craft & Current, plus the companion workbook, a Blackwing pencil, and a few other items. That costs $355.

Course Only

The Bundle

Stories Are Sinew

• Because your life is made up of stories.

• Some of them are transformative, life-changing.

• Those stories make you who you are.

• Some of them are not even true.

• Some are so true they make your teeth hurt.

• Some got told to you in secrecy.

• Some you can’t repeat.

• Some would really benefit other people because you learned something major.

• Some would benefit your children and grandchildren. They would learn more about who you are. They would learn more about who they are.

General Schedule for Each Session

1. We open with a short poem.

2. We do a flow-write or two, very short.

3. I teach a lesson, by lecture & slide deck.

4. We do a craft minute—one particular way to craft your work.

5. We do another bit of writing practice.

Draft Syllabus

Class #1—Find the Story & What to Leave Out

Class #2—Make Your Writing Come Alive

Class #3—Pinpoint Your Theme & Mission

Class #4—The Awesome Outline

Class #5—Truth & Ethics: Who Gets Hurt

Class #6—Honesty & Vulnerability: How to Protect Yourself

Class #7—Research, Especially Interviews + Using AI or Not

Class #8—Emotional Impact & Navigating Upset

Class #9—Place & Setting

Class #10—Get Published & Find Your People

Class #11—Revise: 33 Ways to Improve Your Writing

Class #12—5 Challenges to Great Writing & How to Overcome Them

Ideas Are Great Too

What if my dinner guests had talked about ideas—about democracy, the climate crisis, how AI is reshaping work and creativity, digital misinformation, the economic strain so many people are feeling.

Actually, we did discuss ideas.

Maybe we’re getting too deep in the weeds here. Maybe you’re interested only in reading, not in writing.

In case you are interested in writing, I will tell you that the best way to talk about an idea is to do so through stories.

Guest Speakers

We’ll have a guest speaker (in an additional session, not during class time) every couple of weeks. So far I’ve secured four:

🌀Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, mother, and former bookshop owner. She is the author of The Leaving Season: A Memoir-in-Essays, a Zibby Book Club pick. She is co-editor of the ABA national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire. Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah’s top 5 summer memoirs.

🌀Michelle Dowd is the author of Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult and the Substack Forager Fridays. She was raised on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest where she learned to identify flora and fauna, navigate by the stars, forage for edible plants, and care for the earth.

🌀Ecotherapist Jeanne Malmgren is the author of Good Eye, Bad Eye: A Memoir of Trauma and Truth—the story of a childhood injury and the spiritual search that led her to peace and acceptance of a disability. She writes the Substack Rx Nature.

🌀Award-winning writer Kathryn Wilder works on a ranch in southwestern Colorado, where she writes, cowboys, and lives among mustangs. Her book Desert Chrome: Water, a Woman, and Wild Horses in the West won the Colorado Book Award. Her story “After Birth” published in The Missouri Review, then won the 2025 Western Heritage Award for outstanding magazine article! Her memoir, The Last Cows: On Ranching, Wonder, and a Woman’s Heart, came out in 2025.

Adjunct Sessions

Co-Writing Group. Led by Julie Nowak. Sundays, 1pm ET.

Writing Group. Led by Stacy Mote. Time TBA.

Office Hours. Led by Janisse. Time TBA.

Register, Course Only

Register, the Bundle

Would you be helped by focused attention on memoir-writing for the entire summer? By learning how I’ve done it? By writing groups and coworking sessions?

Please know that I take this work seriously. I ask you to sign an agreement that you make a commitment to the work and do your best to honor it. I ask you to report your total pages when you begin (for lots of people, this is zero) and your total pages at the end of the course.

And yet, it’s not a huge time commitment.

It’s an hour a week for class time. And at least another hour spent writing.

Am I Good at What I Do?

I could be better.

I’m trying to get really, really good at this.

But I’m pretty good already.

I worked with Kathryn Wilder. Her story “After Birth” published in The Missouri Review, then won the 2025 Western Heritage Award for outstanding magazine article! Then she placed her memoir, The Last Cows: On Ranching, Wonder, and a Woman’s Heart, which came out in 2025.

I worked with Rochelle Johnson. Her essay “Phantom Pains” won the Georgia Review Prose Prize, then the 2026 John Burroughs Nature Essay award.

I worked with Patty McLaughlin. Her essay “Listening” won Anthology’s Nature Writing Award and was published online. That was only the second essay she ever published.

I worked with Jennifer Ayres. Her flash essay “Quickening” published in River Teeth.

I take no credit for the successes of these writers. They were already hard-working, far-seeing people when they decided to sign up for a course with me. They did all the work. They get all the credit.

There are more writers like these. Lots more. I’ve worked with many, many people who went on to start Substacks, write books, publish books, win big awards.

What a joy and an honor that has been.

!!!

However, this memoir course is not about success in the big world. It’s about success in YOUR world.

I wanted you to have plenty of time to think about it.

🦬 Announcing

WILD BRANCHES: An Anthology of DNA Surprises

You are going to love this project. It is an anthology of essays about surprises that rocked folks’ world after they took a DNA test. The book features 29 essays, every one well-written, tender, gripping, and true.

This will be a book you finish. You will read every last one of these stories to the soft, susurrating end. You will take this book to bed, to the beach, to the beauty shop.

It’s that good.

We’re going to launch the book using Kickstarter. A pre-launch page is up.

Thank you. You won’t be disappointed.

The book is almost finished, thanks to Hilary Vidalakis, developmental editor and my stellar co-editor. The interior has been designed, and the galley is with MK Creel, who is copyediting it for us. We are arranging a cover designer.

This Kickstarter will include some very-limited-quantity items, including a session with a pro who can help you interpret your DNA results. And a few sourdough starter kits from Dorette E. Snover (sourdough being a family food story.) A writing workshop for family stories.

If you want to get first dibs on items like these, you want to be notified the minute the Kickstarter launches.

We will launch the Kickstarter when we get 500 people signed up for early notification or in June, whichever comes first. The official launch will last about 15 days.

Take me to WILD BRANCHES

🦬 Ecology Ebook Will Be Free on Earth Day

This is a heads-up that the digital version of my book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, will be free on Earth Day.

Probably you’ve read that one already, but if you haven’t, this is a great way to do it. It will be downloadable via BookFunnel, which serves any kind of device you read on. Or you can download a pdf.

How-to will be included in next week’s Trackless Wild.

🦬Wait as Long as Possible To Mow

🦬What I’m Watching

The Walden Woods Project

Thanks to Lorraine Fussell for sending that YouTube link.

🦬What I’m Reading

I bought a copy of Beth Ann Fennelly’s The Irish Goodbye when I was in Oxford, Mississippi, in late March for the Oxford Conference for the Book. Beth Ann knocks the ball out of the park with everything she does, and this collection of micro-memoirs is no exception.

In typical Oxford fashion, behind Beth Ann you see John T. Edge, author of the new memoir, House of Smoke. Behind John T. is Steve Almond, author of Candyfreak and many others.

🦬Last Call To Send Me a Postcard

I’ve been doing an interesting project called Wild Confessions, where people send me a secret written on a postcard. The secrets are anonymous, and the postcards are not traceable. I publish them in Trackless Wild.

The first batch of postcards can be found here.

The second installment can be found here.

I’ll be posting one last installment. Send me a postcard with a secret on it. Get it postmarked by May 1.

If you have already sent a postcard, thank you.

🦬Glad You’re Here

Trackless Wild is the place I publish writing about the natural world and our interface with it. Thank you for allowing me into your wild and precious life.

If you’re new here in the off-trail world, a big welcome.

Read more

I see a strange thing looking at me.

IN OUR LARGE living room stands a woodstove. This past winter, we used it only for the coldest spell. My husband and I constantly worried that our baby, Little Fawn, would touch a red-hot stove.

The woodstove has a glass front. Through it, in winter, we see the fire burning, and that’s nice.

Now that spring has arrived, we see a layer of ashes. They need cleaning out. Nobody has time to do it.

The other day, Little Fawn was playing on the rug in front of the woodstove. Sometimes she focuses on actual toys, but she thinks toys are for babies. She wants to explore the real world. Mostly, she crawls around looking for things to put in her mouth.

My husband, Raven, and I were both within feet of her.

I’m always glancing her way, making sure she’s okay. She had crawled to the tile base on which the woodstove sits. She had lifted herself onto her knees, one of the ways she practices walking. She was standing on her knees.

I kept folding clothes or whatever I was doing. Suddenly, Little Fawn began to scream.

I glanced at her.

She had crumpled, her face to the stucco-colored tiles, and was wailing. Raven was closest. “Grab her!” I said. “She’s hurt. What happened?”

Nothing obvious had happened.

Right out of the blue, in the middle of a day, Little Fawn was sobbing inconsolably, real tears pouring down her face. And nothing obvious was wrong.

Now she was in Raven’s arms, but she continued to wail. When she looked at the woodstove, she cried harder.

Then I saw the problem.

A bird had found its way out of the sky and down the stovepipe and was inside the woodstove. It flew around the iron box, above the cold ashes, trying to find a way out.

Here’s what I suspect happened. Little Fawn had been cruising along. She had crawled toward the woodstove, then stopped to practice standing. She heard scratching and looked inside the glass door.

What she had seen was unexpected and frightening.

She would not stop crying.

The bird needed to get back outside quickly, because jumping around in dusty ashes can’t be good for any respiratory system.

I remembered a morning spent with bird-banders, how the birds flew into netting and became entrapped. And I thought of a piece of mosquito netting we have for the baby’s jogging stroller. It is large, black, with an elastic border. It looks something like a giant hair net. It fits around the stroller to keep mosquitoes off, when an infant is inside.

I had stashed the stroller net in a pocket on the stroller. The stroller was on the porch. I ran outside and found the net.

Inside, Raven tried to comfort Little Fawn.

We stretched the netting around the entire front of the woodstove. Then I slowly opened the door. Raven set down Little Fawn. He moved to one side of the stove, I to the other.

At first, the bird crouched in the back of the firebox. Finally, intrigued by the open door, it flew out into the room. It hit the netting and struggled for a minute.

It was a house finch, exquisitely silver-gray with a wash of purplish red.

Little Fawn began to cry loudly again. The unfolding drama was entirely too much for her.

Raven cupped his hands around the wildly flapping bird. He extricated it from the net.

“A bird,” he said to Little Fawn. “Look, it’s just a bird.”

She knows the word “bird” and she knows what a bird is. But this one, for some reason, terrified her. When Raven held the finch toward her, she screamed.

The bird was safe now, and Raven was already moving toward the door.

I picked up the baby. “Let’s see the bird fly away,” I said. I followed Raven to the door.

We watched.

Raven opened his hand. The bird flung itself away from the humans who had her trapped and zipped toward an orange tree near the back door.

Little Fawn calmed down then.

“Well, I guess the cap has come off the stovepipe,” Raven said. “I’ll need to climb back on the roof and fix that.”

The bird was outside, the baby was calm. And the day went on.

Little Fawn, Little Fawn, what do you see?

I see a strange thing looking at me.

Strange thing, strange thing, what do you see?

I see a scary baby looking at me.

So Glad You’re Here

Trackless Wild is the place I publish my writing about the natural world and our interface with it. Thank you for allowing me into your wild and precious life.

If you’re new here in the off-map world, a big welcome.

To read the story of how a 60-something woman is a new mother, check out “How Little Fawn Came to Be.”

No-Axe April & No-Mow May

We are in the season of spring ephemerals. This is a reminder to wait as long as you can to mow. Let your lawn get messy, if need be. Wade through the clovers. The bees and other pollinators need the nourishment. We all need the beauty.

Against the Dark, the Sea

In the essay What We Make Against the Dark, I wrote about a dream of war. Disturbed too about invasions and wars, Becky Hoover, friend and reader, planned a trip to the coast. She sent me the photo below with the wonderful reminder, Take your grief somewhere powerful enough to hold it for you.❤️

If You’re Near Savannah, Georgia

Writer and friend Chris Fink will be reading at The Book Lady Bookstore this Friday evening, 6:30 pm. Chris arrived here at the farm on Tuesday. We’ve had a wonderful visit. I really hope you go see him on Friday. Tell him I sent you.

Happy Full Moon

Greetings as the Planting Moon rises in the eastern sky.

But I do.

I felt it on Monday.

Monday dawned stormy. Spring cold fronts can be vicious in the Southern U.S., where I live. They bring lines of storms out of the Midwest, and in the roiling air currents, cold meeting hot, tornadoes easily spawn. In spring, people learn to expect disaster.

That’s how Monday looked at sunrise. Disastrous.

Except the sun didn’t rise. A frightening purple cloud towered to the north, hiding the sun, making the farm appear lackluster and fragile in the muddy light. The clouds were heavy, and they lowered until rain began. We kept one eye on the weather as we went about our work.

Raven Cranks Up the Earth Oven

Around noon, Raven (my husband) started a fire in the earth oven. Raven and I both work at home. He was on his three-hour shift with the baby, and he would go out under an umbrella to tend the fire. Every time he went out, he passed under an old-growth redbud tree at our kitchen door. It is holding its annual festival of flowers, every limb a lavender pennant, confetti all over the ground.

From the house, I could see an oak fire burning inside the oven.

The bottom of the oven is made of firebrick, laid on an elevated base. The mound of it is homemade cob, a mixture of clay and straw. Raven built the oven a few years ago.

He keeps sourdough starter, which he cares for as if it’s another farm animal. He keeps it fed and watered. When he decides to make bread, he mixes flour and water with the starter and watches it rise. This he had done on Sunday.

Mid-afternoon, the sky began to lighten, and the weather cleared. The storms fled to parts unknown.

Raven sprinkled semolina flour on what’s called a peel, which looks like a long-handled wooden shovel. He slung some dough into a disk, stretched it on the peel, dashed on olive oil, and covered that with fresh mozzarella, sliced tomatoes, and pepperoni. He sprinkled on oregano.

When he went outside the next time, it was to scrape the fire from the now-raging-hot oven. Then he cleaned the firebrick with a homemade rag mop he fashioned for that purpose.

“Two minutes until we eat,” he called to me.

When the oven is 700 degrees (Fahrenheit), it can cook a pizza in two minutes. I set the table.

We Have Pizza for Supper

Five minutes later, we sat at the kitchen table eating. The baby’s high chair was pulled up close. Little Fawn was strapped in, because if we don’t, she climbs out, climbs onto the table, climbs into the salad, throws the lettuce in all directions. She’s a climber and an explorer.

Now she meticulously picked melted mozzarella off her pizza. Like her parents, she concentrated.

The pizza tasted like toasted sourdough bread, warm and comforting, running with good cheese and good oil, with a wonderful flavor of woodsmoke.

We Were Safe

Outside, the line of storms had passed. The sun was coming out.

A wild azalea in full bloom at the back door smelled heavenly. Already, tiger swallowtails—state butterfly of Delaware, South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia—were feeding at it. The butterflies were so drunk on its nectar that they had allowed the baby and me, earlier in the day, to come right up to them.

Outside each window, in all directions, pastures turned green and filled with henbit, clovers, toadflax. Buckeyes were holding up their red waymarks to the hummingbirds, which have not yet arrived. The orange trees were beginning their bloom. Just that morning, I had peeled one of our last homegrown oranges, stored four months in the refrigerator.

Around us, the Earth was breathing in, taking in carbon dioxide as she put out new buds and leaves. In terms of the carbon cycle, spring is an inhale.

As if life on any day can be so full.

Let’s Put a Governor on This

Is my life perfect? It’s not.

Are there things I don’t have? There are.

Do I have a lot to complain about? I do.

Do I sometimes want to blame others? I do.

Do I dread the bad times that inevitably come? I do.

Yes, the bad stuff is horrifying and overwhelming—the bombing, the hiding-from-ICE, the accidents-while-texting, the sickness, the clearcutting, the bulldozing of nature. Yet, the epidemic of complaining and blaming that I experience in modern culture is mind-boggling.

I have so much that sometimes it embarrasses me.

What About Regular Embarrassments?

I do those too.

I forget someone’s name. I leave the restroom with my zipper down. I fail to pay my car’s registration and get stopped for an expired tag. I let clutter accumulate, then a neighbor stops by for a visit. I gain fifteen pounds.

So, it may be hard to believe that the most embarrassing thing in my life is the beauty, the abundance, the joy, the creativity, the love.

But it’s true.

Spring, warmth, green grass, flowers, a beautiful toddler, a renaissance man for a husband, health, a farm—it’s a life I created. I wanted it. I made it happen. It took years. I love it.

I hope you, too, are immersed in a life of riches, however that looks for you.

Roseate Days, Season of Pink: Photos

In Other News

*Time-Sensitive*

Online—Witch & Famous, Taught by My Digital Marketing Teacher, Captolia Eaton, Closes Today

The following is a promotion. It is not for everyone. It is for people who:

• are learning to market their work

• are developing an online presence

• are running an online business or a business with an online component

• want to be more visible in a digital world

• love to learn and grow

During the pandemic, I pivoted my work as a writer and teacher from in-person to predominantly online. To manage the pivot, I signed up for Witch & Famous. My son, Silas, had recommended it to me because it is taught by his friend Captolia. Her friends call her “Cap.”

The course was life-changing for me.

You need to know right away—

1) The course is not cheap. Tuition is $1,111.

2) However, you can pay on time. Perhaps this would also be a tax deduction for you. It was for me.

3) Also, you pay once, but you are allowed retake the course as long as Captolia offers it, usually once per year. Every year, as the internet changes, there is more to learn.

4) This will be my third time through.

5) And, Captolia is offering you 11% off if you use the code JANISSE when you sign up.

6) Today is the last day to register. Seriously. The 2026 cohort of the course closes today.

7) Captolia is an expert in digital visibility and presence. She’s well-trained, up-to-date, experienced. She’s a pro at mindset work (feeling worthy, for example) and is unbelievably uplifting and encouraging. That alone is worth the tuition.

8) If you are uncomfortable with wide-ranging identities and alternative spiritualities, this may not be the course for you. However, you don’t have to be a witch to learn from Cap, lol. I took it as a non-witch because the course and the teacher were highly recommended to me. Being older, I needed the digital and technological catch-up to keep putting my work into the world.

9) In the end, I attribute Captolia with resetting my nervous system and assisting me to do the online work that I do. The work of showing up takes courage, and courage can be learned.

10) The course also helped transform my relationship with money. As you probably know, I was raised in poverty. As a writer, I accepted poverty for much of my life. Most years, my income was far below the poverty line. In recent years, I have changed my mindset around money, and my work with Captolia moved me far along in this process.

Do not sign up:

1) If you can’t afford the tuition.

2) If the course will put you deeper in debt.

3) If you expect miracles from it.

More information can be found at Witch & Famous.

Oxford, Mississippi—Will You Be at the Oxford Conference for the Book?

Next week, I’ll be traveling to Mississippi to give the Ann Abadie Lecture at the Oxford Conference for the Book. It’s a huge deal, both to me and to all who knew Ann, a creative force at the Center for Southern Culture.

I’ll be talking about place, as it relates to all of us and as it relates to writers and readers. The organizers and I decided to make a special bookmark with a Place Challenge on it. If you’re there, come by and get one.

I recommend the Oxford Conference. First of all, all events are free and open to the public.

Second, you can take the opportunity to visit Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s home; walk around the Square; kiss the Faulkner statue sitting on a bench there; see the ancient catalpa tree on the University of Mississippi campus; take a day-trip down into the Delta; roam the shelves of Square Books; and collect signatures of the many famous writers who will be speaking at the conference. Please let me know if you’re planning to go.

Did You Receive Your Course Edition of JOURNEY IN PLACE?

I published two versions of the book, Journey in Place. One was for widespread distribution and the other was for course participants. The course was a correspondence course here on Trackless Wild, open to paying subscribers. I did my best to mail a copy to everyone who signed up. However, I know I missed some people, because I have a box of books left over. If you were a paying subscriber during 2025 and you have not received a copy of the book, please send your mailing address.

Another Way to Think About Taxes

Good luck with your taxes. I am no tax adviser, but if you had income related to environmental work in 2025, and you are a paying subscriber here, likely your subscription cost is tax-deductible. You may also be able to deduct any nature-related courses you took with me.

Writing a check to the IRS can be dejecting. Here’s a reframe. Remind yourself, as you’re paying taxes, of all the great things that taxes support.

They give us our national parks, for example. Think, as you pay, I am supporting Great Smoky Mountain National Park! Imagine, as you are writing the check, making it out to Yellowstone.

Tonight, on the New Moon, Do This

The New Moon for this lunar cycle is tonight, March 18, at 9:23 pm. It’s a great time to reflect on the kind of world you want to live in and the kind of life you want to have. When the clock strikes 9:23 this evening, be dreaming.

In the Comments

Have you ever had the feeling of having so much richness around you that you’re embarrassed by it? You know that not everyone has it.

Hundreds of people—my little family of three among them—had been shuffled into a barracks. This was a large concrete building in a city. Now, we were outside again. Night was falling. The skies were full of smoke, drones, and planes. We were supposed to be marching. I could see, behind me, blue-gray silhouettes of hundreds of people moving through the bedlam.

I thought of my farm, its green grassy pastures, so far away. I realized that I might never get back to it.

Raven, my husband, and I had found a bench, and we were discussing urgently what we should do. Where would we be most safe? Where would we be able to eat? Where could we hide?

~I~

This was a real dream. I’m not making it up. It happened last night.

~I~

I woke anxious. I woke and began a real conversation with Raven, one in which we make a few plans. One day, I’ll discuss this with you, but today, I do not have the space in my heart. Today, I want to bring you love and hope.

~I~

I was first introduced to the work of Madeleine Jubilee Saito in the climate anthology, All We Can Save. Madeleine is a comic originally from Rockford, Illinois, who now lives in Tokyo.

Here is a piece of her work.

Madeleine’s book, You Are a Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in Climate Crisis, is a collection of these pieces.

In 2024, I taught a one-off course called Journaling the Way Forward in which I combined writing, art, and page design. I included this form. I called it a “Wisdom Quadrant.” Each has four panes, like a comic, but with a message of wisdom.

For the next course, I invited Madeleine to come teach. She calls the form “Poetry Comics.”

I want to share some Wisdom Quadrants/ Poetry Comics with you that were created in our journaling courses. Most of them are unpolished, raw work created in the moment. Some are drawn on lined notebook paper.

Many thanks to all the folks who shared their work with me.

Consider

There is no room for hope, only for determination.

Here is a Template for You

You don’t need this template. It is simply a quadrant. You can draw a large box on a page and divide it into four sections. Come up with a line that you know to be true. Divide the line between the four panes. Then, illustrate each pane with a simple drawing—a cup, a leaf, a flower, a candle, a window.

I would love to see any Poetry Comics that you create.

Wisdom Quadrants Template

6.73KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

If you want to see one of the most remarkable wild spectacles on the planet, I would head to Blue Spring State Park in Orange City, Florida, just outside DeLand.

You’re probably too late this spring to get there.

During winter months, from mid-November to early April, manatees congregate in spring runs, trying to survive cold river waters. Where springwater rushes from underground, the springs register a steady 72 degrees Fahrenheit.

~|~

I’ve been yearning to do a tour of Florida’s springs.

When I was invited to give a talk mid-February at Black Prong, a nature resort near Bronson, FL, I jumped at the opportunity.

My family drove down a day early, spent a night with my sister-in-law in Orange City, and by 8 a.m. the next morning, we were at Blue Spring State Park.

A sign at the entrance reported that the day’s manatee tally was 233.

Manatees aggregate in this place because of a first-magnitude spring, Blue Spring. Water gushes from a cavern in the limestone karst and drifts about 1/3 of a mile to the north-flowing St. Johns River.

Winter gatherings of Florida manatees are an unforgettable spectacle. These gentle, deeply sentient, even spiritual beings can easily be seen in the crystal-clear water. They’re mesmerizing. They levitate above the white sand of the spring creek, resting. Although they’re shockingly huge, they are completely benign, vegetarian. They rest, motionless, until they need to breathe. Then they lift slowly, gently, easily, to the crystalline surface. They blow out a mist of air and sink again, ever so slowly, harmoniously, to the stream bottom.

They never seem to hurry. They never seem to disagree. They don’t fight.

Watching sea-cows, you are shockingly aware that this is not an aquarium. This is a special place where the habits of a wondrous, fantastical creature are within plain sight.

~|~

As the season of spring arrives and river waters warm, manatees leave the spring-run. They go off to summer waters, in search of food and mates.

Each day during this leaving-time, staff at Blue Spring count the manatees. They post the day’s number on their Facebook page.

Today, March 4, the number of manatees at Blue Spring is 8. It’s way down. Staff described today as “soft snuffles, gentle ripples, and all the calm we needed.”

I’m sure.

On a busy day in winter, cars are lined up long before 8 a.m., waiting for the park gates to open. People stream in.

Park staff tally the cars entering, and when the place reaches its carrying capacity, the park closes. It reopens as visitors leave.

During winter months, floods of people need to be watched and managed.

I’m sure 8 manatees represent a nice level of calmness. After months dealing with hordes of tourists, the place deserves a little calm.

We all do.

~|~

I remember, a few decades ago, when biologists reported that only 500 Florida manatees remained. Total.

Now, between 8,000 and 11,000 manatees live in Southern waters.

This is the result of hard work on the part of environmentalists—educating the public, pushing policies that safeguard manatees, protecting and restoring stream-runs. The species has been upgraded from endangered to threatened. Hallelujah. This is fabulous news for one of the most interesting creatures on the planet.

~|~
Look at manatee history at Blue Spring itself.

1970—Two years before the state park was established, researchers tracked 14 manatees in the spring run.

2005—After years of park improvements and manatee protection efforts, wintering manatee numbers exceeded 200.

2023—The manatee count skyrocketed to a record 729.

~|~
When manatees are hanging out in the warmth of Blue Spring, water activities, such as swimming and boating, are not allowed. That is about Nov. 15 to April 1.

You are allowed to walk a nice, wide boardwalk along the spring-run, pausing underneath live oaks, magnolias, and cabbage palms to gaze your eyes upon the delicious—delirious, really—sight of manatees in clear water.

This is original Florida, real Florida, flowery Florida.

Looking out over the spring, counting manatees, listening to them blow at the surface, watching them sink again—you can’t help but think of early explorers and how they, too, must have sunk to their knees in disbelief when they came upon this panorama.

No doubt they, too, conjured the word “paradise.”

~|~

We go to walk the spring-run filled with an amity of manatee because we yearn for the wildness that is within us, that keeps calling us, no matter how far from it we get. Likewise, we yearn for lives free of violence and threat. This is why we go to gaze upon the beatific, peaceful, gentle sea-cows.

Likewise, the manatees gaze upon us. “Do not bomb us,” they say.

In these moments of communion, we realize that we are all of the same world. What we want is the same.

Why not act like it?

The Manatee Photo Album

In the Comments

What is your experience with manatees? Have you seen them in the wild? Where? How many? How close? What happened?

A Ranger Gets the Seed Book

A few weeks ago, in a post called “Season of Seeds: My Top 5 Seed Companies,” I announced that I would put all comments through a “random picker” and pick one person to receive a copy of my book The Seed Underground. I am happy to announce that “natureguided” was chosen. I’ve learned that this is Rick Jacobson, who had a career with the National Park Service, working at Everglades, Big Cypress, Carlsbad Caverns, Big Bend, and Yosemite. Now retired, he lives in Tallahassee.

Likewise, This Week

My book Wild Spectacle has a tearjerker of a story about something that happened to me many years ago during a guided swim with manatees. I will do the same with this week’s comments. All will go into a Random Picker, and I will mail someone a hardback copy of the book.

🪷In times of war and in times of peace, be tender like the manatee.🪷

Lately, a number of people have confided to me that they are grieving places. I want to give you five examples.

1. In a recent discussion, a woman named Julianne introduced herself in this way:

2. The following testimony came from Cyndi in Utah. “I’m trying to learn a new place,” she said. “Behind my home was a six-acre horse pasture. Now, there are thirty-one houses on an old horse pasture. I’m having to go out to find wildness. Mondays are my hiking days.”

3. Joyce, of Texas, had to decide whether to stay or go when a giant condominium went up next door to her.

4. In Tifton, Georgia, the Culbreath home once backed up to a wild woods. Now, from their back door, they can look into the backyards of many apartment dwellers. Every single living tree is gone.

5. Sylvia, after a tornado slashed through her Florida neighborhood, mourned a tree. On one of its limbs, she had often seen an owl perched. She mourned the owl.

🌳

In the hands of developers and in the aftermath of climactic disruptions, our places change so fast that we can experience cognitive dissonance.

We suddenly feel out of place, adrift, grief-stricken.

Our places become more barren and more homogenous.

Our stories stop making sense.

Culture disintegrates, or at least shapeshifts into a different culture.

🌳

I have never seen my immediate landscape altered so intensely as it was the night of Sept. 26, 2024, when Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm, arrived. Entire forests I loved went down. Over a year later, we are still recovering, but the truth is that recovery is not possible.

🌳

A clearance, a hole, a disappearance—these result in a kind of dementia. We’re confused. An entire map of what we knew is gone. We try to recall it.

Or maybe the result is amnesia. We wake up and we’re someplace else. We’re not even sure where we are.

Definitely the result is grief.

🌳

Every one of us has experienced this kind of grief.

🌳

I’ve thought about grief a lot. I can do grief. I’m really good at it, although that’s not an attribute I’m proud of. I’d prefer to be better at action, better at saving native ecosystems, better at philanthropy.

I know a few things about grief that I can pass on.

🌳

I learned Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief way back in high school, in a class called “Death and Dying.” I relearned them in my forties in hospice training—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

I sat with Mr. G weekly during the last months of his life. I assisted my friend Serena through the veil. I cared for my father, Franklin, and was with him, too, when he died.

And I know this.

Maybe there are only five stages of grief, but I have never experienced them as such. Skip denial, for example. The morning after the ice storm, every tree in the yard is gone. There’s no denying that.

Skip bargaining. With whom do we bargain? The only way to get those trees back is to head to a nursery. Get saplings planted as soon as the ground thaws.

Forget acceptance, at least for now.

So where is the actual grieving?

Grief is a feral thing. It wrestles you to the ground. It kidnaps you. You’re pretty sure it’s going to kill you. It makes you crazy. It has you howling. It keeps you up all night. It scares the hell out of you.

Then it goes off somewhere. Suddenly it’s back, only a few feet away, and it leaps on you in an instant.

It backs off. But it’s there, day after day, roving through the treetops.

🌳

So that’s the first thing. The way we were taught to expect grief—prim little stages—is not accurate. Not for me, anyway, and not for most people I know.

In fairness, Kubler-Ross never said they were linear.

So why call them stages? Why not elements? And let’s go ahead and add bottomless despair to the list.

🌳

Second, grief is often spatial—what was in a certain place is gone. That thing or that person is gone. You have to redraw your mental map. That takes time.

🌳

So, let’s look at the question, What if your sanctuary gets destroyed?

• Prepare for wild grief.

• Prepare to make big transitions.

• Prepare to refocus. Cyndi began to hike away from home. Julianne began to upgrade her home, to better care for what she actually owns.

• Work with your grief. Journal. Write poems. Paint pictures. Make ceremonies.

• Calm your nervous system in whatever ways you can.

• Get therapy.

🌳

Beyond grief, we desperately need extreme policies in place to quickly protect all natural systems, even single trees; to restore forests; and to mitigate the climate crisis in all ways possible.

It’s also time to have deeply honest conversations about what has made and continues to make a place a good home. We need to address what we love and want to keep in our policy-making and our advocacy.

This would be our last visit for a while. An Episcopal priest, Mother Leeann has been called to a church in Wyoming, after a couple of decades living in Tifton, Georgia, two hours from me. She’ll be back often. Her contract gives her three months off. Albert, her husband, a peanut pathologist, has not yet retired.

No matter. My friend’s move is the end of an era, one that meant a lot to me.

🪶

We had just arrived for lunch. Albert had come out to greet us, their son Zeke right behind. Zeke’s a young man now, a college student, although I remember the day he was born. He’s a kid I’ve always known and loved.

Five of us stood in Leeann’s front yard, feeling the day holding us, feeling the future, with its surprises, feeling also the past, with its joys and pains. Now, on this last visit before the end of an era, I felt as if I’d finally been given permission to feel the years behind and ahead. I felt how limited they were, how much had changed, how many goodbyes need to be said in a normal lifetime.

I felt as if I would weep the entire two hours back home.

🪶

Leeann and I met in grad school in Montana. We were both in the English Department, both teaching assistants. We shared an office. We became close friends.

Later, when I married Raven, Leeann attended our wedding. So did Albert. There they met. Before long, Leeann had married Albert, moved to Tifton, and become the mother of two little boys. My old friend lived close by, our politics were aligned, our lives were intertwined.

🪶

Now, Zeke heard the bugling first. He is the most spectacular outdoorsperson I’ve ever known. Maybe one day I can write about him.

“Cranes!” he said.

We tipped our heads upward and, yes, a loose string of sandhill cranes flapped northward. They moved through the baby blue dome of sky, beneath a bright, early-spring sun. They zoomed messages at us, using the mirrors of their wings.

“I was in the garden Sunday,” Albert wrote me one year, “when I heard cranes. Actually, I felt them more than I heard them.” That day, Albert witnessed a flock of over 100, flying northward, calling back and forth to each other their magnificent ga-roo-roo-roos.

Now, a second vee appeared from the south and passed overhead. Then a third. That vee closed above us, and the cranes began to circle, flashing white dots and dashes. Don’t weep, they seemed to be saying. Do not weep. We have been doing this for thousands of years. You can too.

🪶

A sandhill crane stands four to five feet tall, with a gray body and a red forehead. They winter in the Southern U.S. and migrate north in early spring. (A few populations are non-migratory.) Eighty percent of them will use a stretch of the Platte River in Nebraska, a resting-place I’ve wanted to visit but never have.

Sandhill cranes are strong flyers, and during migration, they may travel as many as 400 miles in one day. They continue north, as far as Siberia, to breed.

They court with enthusiastic, leaping dances. They mate for life and nest in marshes and other open, treeless clearings and plains.

Florida naturalist Archie Carr once wrote that only three great animal voices remain in the southeastern United States—

1. “the jovial lunacy of the barred owl”

2. “the roar of the alligator”

3. “the ethereal bugling of the sandhill crane”

I turned to Albert. “You live exactly in their flyway,” I said. How amazing was that.

“They basically follow I-75,” he said.

🪶

Cranes never fail to put me in mind of my great friend Milton Hopkins, a passionate observer of wildlife on his Osierfield, Georgia farm. Milton, who also lived in the flyway, dropped me notes to say when the cranes were passing. Sometimes they descended to feed or spend the night. Once, Milton was standing in a field when a flock of over 300 cranes landed.

He died while burning the woods one early spring day. I have never recovered. We are nearing the anniversary of his death.

Maybe Milton heard the cranes, Albert wrote me, and decided to fly off with them.

Right in the middle of his funeral, a long vee of sandhill cranes passed overhead, sounding their ancient music, their rattling trumpets.

🪶

When we hear sandhill cranes in late winter, we know spring is on its way. Red maples are reddening the bottomlands. Carolina jessamine begins to bloom, great yellow sweeps twining through the trees. I start looking for purple martins to arrive from South America and the first dogtooth violets to bloom. Soon, frogs will be breeding, and we’ll see our first swallow-tail kites.

Milton always reported the cranes migrating between March 1 and 19. But this is February.

🪶

People say the cranes are moving earlier in the spring and later in the fall, and that climate disruption is responsible. The climate crisis has disrupted many evolutionary adaptations species. South Florida birds are moving into Georgia. Some birds are not migrating as they once did. The cranes themselves seem not to be overwintering as far south.

Studies show that spring has rushed forward a range of 2-5 days per decade over the last thirty years. This means that spring comes roughly 7–16 days sooner.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change describes widespread advances in spring plant phenology—about 1–3 days earlier per decade—in many regions. Some plants flower earlier or later, and some leaf out at crazy times. Often fruit trees bloom early, only to get blossoms zapped by late frosts.

These changes led the Arbor Day Foundation to redraw its hardiness zone maps, first in 2006, using the most recent fifteen years of NOAA weather data.

In 2023, they updated the maps again. About half of the U.S. has shifted to the next warmer half-zone. For example, 8a is now 8b. In most regions of the country, gardeners are getting longer growing seasons.

🪶

When things change so often and so chaotically, a person can feel shaky. As a human, we want to be able to depend on patterns and schedules. Our psyches resist too much chaos and crisis.

Now, it seems, we can depend on very little. There’s too much rain. School gets cancelled and houses flooded and roads closed. There’s too much wind and trees fall.

Then there’s not enough rain, and we’re deep in a sucking drought.

Then there’s a tornado or a hurricane or a derecho or a cyclone.

Our friends move away.

🪶

So many things in my life are still in their spring. The baby is spring, for example, just getting started. My wisdom body is yet young. I am only now learning how not to worry, how to love myself, how to accept myself as I am, how to have enough, how to turn and help others along on their journeys.

I know that.

But I have also entered the time of my life when the rate of life-change has sped up. Friends are retiring, friends are migrating, young friends are graduating and going off, friends are getting sobering diagnoses, friends are passing on. I know, as Stanley Kunitz wrote in his wonderful poem “Layers,” that “I am not done with my changes.”

Live in the layers, he wrote. Not in the litter.

The ancient migration of the sandhill cranes, going and coming, has been something we could depend on. Their migrations thread through the years of my life.

Yesterday, the birds, headed north, helped me make peace with that.

Our Shared Vision

May we make the policy and personal adaptations we humans need to make—and make them quickly—in order to mitigate and reverse climactic disruptions. May we protect life on Earth. May we keep Earth habitable, beautiful, sheltering.

More on Sandhill Cranes

Another recent Substack looks at sandhill crane migration. Check out Double Take: Florida’s Sandhill Cranes by , on her Substack, The Sunday Bluff Naturalist.

Ray Zimmerman, author of the Substack , writes often about sandhill cranes and their Tennessee stopover at Hiawassee Refuge.

of Independent Traveler writes about a crane stopover in Indiana at Jasper-Pulaski Fish & Wildlife Area.

reports on sandhill cranes in the Gila River Valley of New Mexico in this post, The Call of the Sandhill Cranes, that appeared on his Substack, Speaking for the Trees, No Matter Where They're From.

wrote about Sandhill Cranes in Colorado.

Thank You

Thank you for caring, for being here, for all you do. May you be weathering the changes.

A blanket is a set of arms. It wraps around a child to keep her warm, cosy, and cuddled. A blanket is a mammal’s fur, soft and thick. It is a mother. A father.

A blanket is a shelter.

~*~

When I was suddenly called, in August of 2024, to retrieve a baby girl from a NICU, I had no blanket. Scurrying about, I found a baby blanket that had belonged to my grown son thirty-five years earlier.

Later I told the story, here in Trackless Wild, of being an older mother with a new baby, of how unprepared I was. I never asked for a blanket for Little Fawn. But they began to arrive.

A blanket is solidarity.

A blanket is art.

A blanket is a hug.

A blanket is benevolence.

A blanket is nurture.

A blanket is love.

~*~

I’ve wanted to submit this photo essay to you for months now. February seems a good time to do it.

This is about the nature of generosity.

Read more

Today’s post is magazine-style, with many small pieces rather than one long essay. I hope this report finds you well, energized, and at peace.

🦬 Farm Report

Our line of martin gourds, hanging between the house and a cow pasture, were in need of repair. After a few years a real gourd begins to crack and break. They can become dangerous for chicks and parents.

In our part of the world, martin scouts show up in early February. A scout arrives to check out housing arrangements and is available to greet the large migrations when they arrive.

In advance of the scouts, we have renovated our strings of gourdhouses. I say “we,” but I mean my husband, Raven.

He found gourds for sale near Wrens, Georgia. He brought them home, cut a 2⅛- inch hole in the side of each, drilled drain-holes in the bottoms, and hung them so their entryway is tilted slightly downward, protected from rainwater. He painted each one white, to reflect the hot summer sun.

We want them safe for martin babies.

The gourds hang from a metal cable. They look like prayer flags.

Imagine a spring day. The ground is a carpet of henbit, toadflax, tiny yellow clovers, dandelions. Try to ignore the stinging nettle that got introduced to our farm that, for a couple of months in spring, makes walking barefoot difficult. You are standing beside a large basket of laundry, hanging it to dry. The baby is strapped into a baby swing hanging from a pecan limb a few feet away. You give her a big push and she sails toward the sky. You hang a few onesies and towels, fast, as she swings, her arcs getting slower and slower, until you need to push her again.

Around you the purple martins are singing. They are soaring and diving, feeding on the wing. They are appearing at gourd-holes with sprigs of hay in their beaks. By mid-summer their fledglings will be peeking out the entranceways, ready to leap out over the pasture, strengthening themselves for their first migration to South America.

They own the place as much as you. They know it more intimately than you. They have traveled every inch of it. They know where to find water (in the marsh, in the cow troughs, at the pond down the road.) They know the songs to sing when the sun is rising and when it is setting.

We don’t have television at the farm. We don’t have a streaming service.

We have the brilliant purple martin song for hanging laundry.

🦬 Phenology

Killdeer are combing the pastures inch by inch. With no indication they have been startled, they will suddenly fly up, screeching, move sideways as a flock and alight again. I don’t understand their motivations, but I keep watching, trying to make sense of it all.

This week a doe emerged from the treeline to the north with two yearlings. Before hunting season, the little herd on our farm had reached five. I’m glad three remain. Now that the season is over, they are coming out of hiding.

I have one little patch of wild violets under a crepe myrtle tree in the side yard. They are in flower.

The daffodils and paperwhites, although not native, began blooming before last week’s ice and snow, and the 19-degree weather did not faze them. The last few days we’ve had a warming spell, with highs in the 70s Fahrenheit. The daffodils are coming on strong.

On the first day of the year I watched a loggerhead shrike outside the kitchen window. It is still hanging around. It appears to be searching for insects among the dry seedheads of winged aster.

The pastures are brown, the fall flora lingers in leafless stalks and brown seedheads, the trees stick out from the ground bare-limbed, and mostly the birds are silent. This morning a red-shouldered hawk flew in a wave-like pattern, up and down, across the farm, hollering loudly.

🦬 Full Moon

This month’s full moon was so large and golden—thrilling!—that I find myself grieving its wane. I’ve never felt this way before. I love the moon in all its phases. But no. This week it has been a beacon. It brought a sense of stability. It felt like a gift sent to me personally.

It was full on Sunday, Feb. 1, at 5:09 pm Eastern Time. I was teaching online, the Journaling Place course, at the exact time it was perfectly full. One hundred fifty of us were gathered together, making Wisdom Quadrants about place.

This February moon, depending on your culture, is known as Snow Moon or Deep Snow Moon, also Ice Moon, Sleet Moon, Makes Branches Fall In Pieces Moon (Abenaki), Frost Sparkling in the Sun Moon (Arapaho), and When Trees Crack Because of Cold Moon (Lakota). Also Midwinter Moon, Moon of Big Famine (Choctaw) and Hunger Moon (Cherokee.)

Those names do not apply to my place and life. I wrote about choosing new names in the post, “Why I’m Naming the Full Moons Myself.”

In her last newsletter, writer of Dream Geographies names her February moon “Song in the Snow Moon.” She wrote, “I heard someone singing before dawn as they walked through our recent heavy snows. It felt both mournful and hopeful.”

This year my name for February’s full moon is “Grieving You Before You Are Gone Moon.”

I am feeling the same kind of grief for the baby. She has learned to balance without holding on, and any day she will be taking her first tiny, shaky steps. I have loved her babyhood. I have loved being a mother again, this late chance. I have loved holding her—carrying her around—strapping her to my belly—packing her on my back.

Soon she will be a toddler, and I will never be a mother with a baby again. You cannot even imagine how tightly I am holding on to these precious, brightly lit, golden days.

🦬 Terroir Seeds Needs a Grower for Seminole Pumpkins

Last week I highlighted five seed companies that I, as a Southern gardener, mostly use. I added a bonus company, Terroir Seeds | Underwood Gardens.

In spring 2022, Stephen Scott, who with his wife Cindy owns and operates Terroir, wrote and asked if I minded if they offered Seminole pumpkins in their store. They had read about the pumpkin in The Seed Underground.

Of course I wouldn’t mind. That amazing food is part of the human commons, and my goal has been to help it along.

Terroir Seeds, as Stephen told me, “works exclusively with open-pollinated and heirloom seeds, mostly unique, with amazing flavors, and with fascinating stories.”

I promised to supply seeds. And did. Terroir was able to offer the pumpkin for a couple of years, but they lost the grower.

This week Stephen wrote to thank me for mentioning Terroir in the post. About the Seminole pumpkin, he wrote, “As you noted, the challenges with growers are the ‘real work’ of seed stewardship—the biology is easy; the logistics are the hard part.”

Then he had an idea. One of my readers might like to grow the pumpkin for Terroir. Terroir has the seed stock and the expertise.

Thank you for considering. The pumpkin grows beautifully in Zones 9 & 8 & 7. In my zone, I’m able to get two crops. The pumpkin is small and compact, tasty and sweet, and can last a year in storage. In the field, it’s resistant to the wilts that are destroying squashes.

Stephen may be reached at stephen @ underwoodgardens.com.

🦬 You Have One More Week to Enter a Seed Book Giveaway

If you make a comment on the post, Season of Seeds: My Top 5 Seed Companies, you will automatically be entered in a giveaway. It includes a copy of my book The Seed Underground and a packet of home-grown Seminole pumpkin seeds. Leave a comment—any kind of comment—on the post. On Feb. 12, 2026, I will put all commenters into an online Random Picker, which will choose one recipient. Today, the post has seventy comments.

🦬 Send Me a Secret on a Postcard

I would love to receive a secret from you, written on a postcard. Don’t include identifying information—no name or return address. If a postmark reveals a hint about where you live, I will redact it.

Thanks to everyone who has mailed a postcard already. I hope you’ve seen Installment #1 and Installment #2, each with ten poignant, powerful secrets and with equally poignant messages back from readers. For the duration of the project, I will post in batches of ten or so.

Any postcard you choose to use is fine.

If you create your own, the standard size is 4 x 6 inches, on paper that is cardstock or thicker. That size requires a postcard stamp, currently $.53.

A postcard can be any size, of course. Those larger than 5 inches x 7 inches will require a letter stamp of $.73.

And my mailing address is...

Janisse Ray

895 Catherine T. Sanders Road

Reidsville, GA 30453

🦬 What I’m Listening To

Bruce Springsteen singing “Streets of Minneapolis.” Many thanks to for sending it. I had not heard about the song, and I wept bitter tears as I listened.

🦬 What I’m Reading

I recently finished Heart the Lover by Lily King. It’s a glorious novel written in second person—you. “You” is a past lover. This is a poignant, extremely well-written, mesmerizing love story. I devoured it. Here reviews it in her stack, Friday Night Readers.

At the recommendation of many people and after hearing Australian writer Helen Garner interviewed on The Shift with Sam Baker Podcast, I read The Children’s Bach. It’s short, quick to read, and absolutely remarkable. I plan to read more of Garner’s work. (The Shift for midlife women is one of the stacks I invest in.)

I found Writing Creativity and Soul by Sue Monk Kidd in the new books section of the Saint Simons Island Public Library, when I was visiting to celebrate my birthday this week. (Who goes to a library to celebrate their birthday?) I was on page 42 by the time we arrived home. Little Fawn was completely annoyed by my submersion into a book. What I’m finding most interesting is that Sue includes mystery in her manual, the thing I call the “mysterium” in Craft & Current. Finally, writers are talking about that third space that is beyond 1) the body and 2) the mind.

🦬 Please Note How Substack Handles Subscriptions. This Is Important.

If you become a paying subscriber to a Substack, an odd thing happens. Your subscription will be automatically renewed. I want to talk about that.

First, Thank You

I deeply appreciate paying subscribers. I’ve been a writer all my adult life—solely an independent writer, without the normal benefits or paid vacations or sick days. I have devoted my entire life to writing, to my belief in the power of stories to transform us, and to transformation itself—not to become worse people but to become better versions of ourselves. If you support me financially in this endeavor, thank you. I use your money wisely in caring for a baby, a farm, wild beauty, a good life, wild restoration.

Thank you for everything you do for me.

Please know I am not a proponent of automatic renewal. As a person who thinks of money as time and energy, and who pays attention to where I put this time and energy, I want to be able to choose.

Subscription Cost

During 2024, when I offered the correspondence course Journey in Place, Trackless Wild cost $99/year for paying subscribers. In January 2025, I lowered the amount to $33, a more affordable rate for anyone who wishes to belong.

However, Substack continues to auto-renew at the rate you originally contributed.

Therefore

If you are still paying $99/year and you wish to support me at that level, deep thanks to you for your abundance and generosity.

To Move to the $33/year Rate

If your financial situation has changed and you wish to lower your rate to $33, you will need to cancel your subscription, then re-subscribe at the lower rate.

Note: I just heard from a subscriber who has attempted to do this. Substack only offers a re-subscribe at the old rate. You may have to wait until your current subscription ends, then re-subscribe at the new rate. I’m sorry this is so annoying.

To Avoid Auto-Renewal

Not long ago, a person could subscribe to a Substack and immediately choose whether to auto-renew or not.

I have recently subscribed to a few publications, and I no longer see that choice offered.

To avoid auto-renewal, subscribe to the publication, then immediately go in and cancel your subscription. Your current subscription will continue for the year. At the end of the year, you will be invited to re-subscribe.

Apologies

I apologize for the extra steps and effort involved.

Thank You Again

Substack has been a gamechanger for me. Your subscription is a direct and democratic vote of support, which is to say love. That is priceless. It is something I never imagined and actually didn’t know to be possible. Having you support me directly—you to me—with the ability to instantly interact with each other, has transformed my writing life completely.

Back in 2022, I wrote about how I almost quit writing. Industrial literature was pushing me farther into a corner, impoverishing me, silencing me. It did this to a lot of people, especially women, especially women of a certain age. If you missed that piece, it’s called “The Question I’ve Wrestled With.”

You, my dear you, solved this misfortune for me.

My gratitude is truly profound. Thank you for investing in me.

For Paying Subscribers

Most of my posts involving my deeply personal life, especially my life as an aging mother to a baby, are behind a paywall. In addition, I will be writing more about the American political crisis, especially as it relates to our defense of nature and place, and those posts will be available to paid subscribers only.

🦬 Learn to Recognize AI Bots on Substack & Other Platforms

I began to notice a subscriber named “Neural Foundry” making comments on my posts, as well as on the posts of others.

As I investigated, I came to believe that Neural Foundry is an AI bot—an automated account that posts or comments without a human directly pressing “send”—trained to respond to stacks.

I found nothing personal on their account. No photos, no names, no mention of anything human.

Every comment Neural Foundry made read like an AI summary of the post itself. Over and over.

Yes, a human could be feeding the post into Chatgpt and asking for a summary. More likely, it is a bot.

These Substack subscribers are particularly interesting because in every comment they leave, they mention something meant to make them look human. They learned the guitar. They went to university. They taught middle school.

In addition, the bot will often misspell a word. Or two.

Apparently the AI bot is being trained to say personal things, pretending to be human, as well as trained to misspell, since that makes them seem even more human.

I have now tracked a number of these accounts. In almost every case, the human writer both “likes” and “comments” in return. (I did notice one Substacker replied with “Hmmm. Sounds like AI.”

Please proceed with caution.

I have been preaching for a year now that we need to quit our wholesale disgust over AI and begin paying close attention to how it is changing our world, including how it fools us. I have quit liking bot comments or engaging with them in any way. I block them when I recognize them.

Trackless Wild is written by a real human being, edited by the same human, and illustrated by humans.

I love real human subscribers. I do not wish for my subscriber numbers or engagement to be propped up by artificial accounts.

What About You?

Have you seen this new trend? How are you responding?

🦬 Upcoming Events

Bronson, Florida

Feb. 15, 7-8 pm EST—Lecture: Water, Wildlife & Wilderness | Black Prong Nature Resort

Columbus, Georgia

March 14, all day—Keynote | Columbus Botanical Garden

Oxford, Mississippi

March 25, 6-7 pm EDT—Oxford Conference for the Book | Ann Abadie Lecture in Southern Studies

🦬 Until Next Week

Be well, be wild, be of great courage.

I’d like to tell you about the most hopeful thing in the world. It is a seed.

We have entered the season of seeds. This season comes early for me, since I live and grow in the subtropics, but no matter where we live, we are beginning to think about spring. For gardeners, now’s the time to order seeds.

This week I wish to share my Top 5 seed companies with you.

Of course, I believe that the best seeds are the ones you grow yourself. I’m a fan of seed-saving, for many reasons—

1. You own the source of your food.

2. You breed varieties adapted to your place, simply by the decisions you make about which seeds to save.

3. You get to enjoy the entire life-cycle of plants in your garden.

4. You get to work with the most hopeful thing in the world.

Seed-saving is not possible for most of us. Our next right act is choosing to order seeds from great companies. Below are five. My considerations for support are

• environmental ethics and business practices

• geographical location. I support companies from the Southeast first.

• prioritizing of organic seed and regenerative agriculture

• focus on open-pollinated seed. These seeds are not laboratory hybrids, and they can be saved year after year without the crop reverting to a parent line.

• emphasis on the home gardener and small farmer

I know many beautiful seed growers and seed companies. Apologies to all I wasn’t able to include here.

1.

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

Mineral, Virginia

I have been a devoted supporter and buyer of Southern Exposure seeds for most of my adult life. So much I love about this company. This is my “go-to” place for seeds.

Southern Exposure is a “worker-run cooperative where every worker has a voice in the decisions of the company and where workers receive equal compensation regardless of the economic value traditionally placed on the jobs done.” They are housed at Acorn Community, a commune in Virginia.

Although the company was founded by Jeff McCormack, who moved south from Vermont in search of a longer growing season, it has been managed by Ira Wallace for decades. Ira is a phenomenal grower and the author of The Timber Press Guide to Vegetable Gardening in the Southeast.

Did you ever see the short video, “Seed Savers?” In it, Ira shows me around the farm at Southern Exposure. This is a short by award-winning documentary filmmaker Ethan Payne. It’s a keeper, and I hope you take a look.

Here’s the listing for the Tina James’ Magic Evening Primrose, the flower that we are celebrating in the short.

Southern Exposure’s list of seed growers reads like a Who’s Who in the local food movement. Take a look if this obsesses you too.

2.

Sow True Seeds

Asheville, North Carolina

This is another fabulous seed company that offers high-quality, open-pollinated seed in support of sustainable food production and regenerative agriculture. The company was founded by lifelong gardener and food activist, Carol Koury, in 2009. In 2020 it became an employee-owned cooperative.

In the name, “true” refers to open-pollinated seeds. When you plant them, the seeds from your crops can be planted and will grow “true.”

Sow True Seed, in their words, provides gardeners with open-pollinated seed varieties and actively works to create better access to healthy food in a regenerative, sustainable, and inclusive environment. They want to cultivate a sense of empowerment and connection in an era of disengagement from nature, food, and community.

I’ve ordered many wonderful seeds and plants from Sow True.

Many of their seed packets are designed by US-based artists. If you are an artist, you may submit your artwork to them for consideration. The submission window opens Feb. 1 and closes March 1. Payment is $150 and ten packets of the seed you designed. Find out more info on their website.

My partner, Raven Waters, is an artist who loves to paint flowers. He painted a foxglove for a Sow True seed packet. This particular Digitalis grew in Oak Spring Garden, Virginia.

3.

High Mowing Organic Seeds

Wolcott, Vermont

This year High Mowing Organic Seeds celebrates thirty years in business. I’ve been a customer and supporter the entire time.

Tom Stearns was one of those people who, like me, knew as a kid that he loved gardens and seeds. He started this company in 1996 with just 28 varieties, many of which had originated in his backyard. Tom was passionate about the development of productive, organic varieties, and he wanted to make organic seed available to home gardeners and commercial growers across North America. Now the seed company offers over 700 heirloom, open-pollinated and hybrid varieties of vegetable, fruit, herb and flower seed.

I’ve met Tom a number of times, including at a Georgia Organics conference years ago. He has now retired, and passed management on to CEO Andrea Tursini. In a recent newsletter, speaking of seeds, Andrea said, “I feel inordinately lucky to work with such tiny, powerful teachers, and to be able to offer them to you both as inspiration and as generators of food and beauty for your families and communities.”

Since I live in a radically different climate, High Mowing is not my go-to supplier. I just love what they do, and I follow their work. The High Mowing newsletter is packed with good information. Don’t miss out on a current giveaway of their Seed Starting Kit on Instagram.

4.

ECHO Global Farm

Fort Myers, Florida

This one will surprise you. Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization (ECHO) is a faith-based nonprofit in Fort Myers, Florida whose mission is to end hunger. They teach small-scale, sustainable farming methods so families around the world can provide for themselves and their communities. They provide thousands of packets of trial seeds to farmers and help establish community seed banks to increase food security. They work in Asia, Central America and the Caribbean, North America, East Africa, and West Africa.

A visit to ECHO Demonstration Farm, if you’re in the Fort Myers area, is eye-opening. You can plan your visit here. They have an active bookstore and nursery, and if you’re interested in tropical food-plants, I recommend visiting the online seed store at ECHO Farm.

Check out moringa. “Native to India. Most parts of the plant are edible. Leaves are high in calcium, vitamins A, B, and C. Young roots are blended with vinegar as horseradish and the seed can be used to purify water. It is drought-resistant growing well in infertile, dry soils to 1000 m. Can also be used as animal feed.” You can purchase 10 seeds for $5.00.

5.

Seed Savers Exchange

Decorah, Iowa

This is a very, very important organization. Their work springs from the terrible fact that, in the last century, world lost 75 percent of edible plant varieties. As they say, “A system that depends heavily on few crops is extremely fragile. When seed diversity is strong, our food system is protected, as this diversity increases the likelihood of having crop varieties that can adapt to different climate conditions and become resistant to certain diseases.”

In 1975 Diane Ott Whealy and Kent Whealy founded the Seed Savers Exchange. Diane’s grandfather, Baptist John Ott, entrusted to them the seeds of two heirloom open-pollinated varieties, ‘Grandpa Ott’s’ morning glory and ‘German Pink’ tomato. These seeds—brought by Grandpa Ott’s parents from Bavaria (Germany) when they immigrated to Iowa in 1884—became the first two varieties in the collection.

I’ve been affiliated with the Seed Savers Exchange since 1980 or so. Over the years it has become less grassroots in its approach. No matter, its mission is a vital one: to keep heirloom seeds in our gardens and on our tables. And its catalog is wonderful.

Order here. They offer free shipping on seed packet orders over $25.

I’ve visited the Seed Savers Exchange. I wrote about that journey in The Seed Underground.

Bonus Company

I don’t want to sign off without mentioning Terroir Seeds. I’ve never visited these seeds-people, but I tremendously admire their offerings.

Terroir Seeds | Underwood Gardens

Chino Valley, Arizona

The folks who run Terroir Seeds, Stephen and Cindy Scott, are my kind of people. If you peruse their website, you will see this for yourself. They align their business completely with their own ethics. I worked with them to bring Seminole Pumpkin to the marketplace. I know personally their level of integrity and enthusiasm for food security. Something happened with their grower, sadly, and the pumpkin is not currently listed.

Note:

Here I originally listed Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds of Mansfield, Missouri for their spectacular website and seed catalog. I knew of the conservative leanings of this company, but I was alerted, in the comments below, to events that I hadn’t known about.

Otherwise

🦬Podcast Alert—Learning to Be in Place Through Seeds

I was recently on The Seed Farmer Podcast with Dan Brisebois. In this episode, “Learning to Be in Place Through Seeds,” we talk about about the concept of place-keeping and how a person learns to be in place. We explore how this works with gardens, seeds, and foodways. We also talk about the tension between trying to save every seed and focusing on growing a few crops that are important to you.

🦬Consider a Course in Learning to Garden

Stephanie Cornais—science educator, master naturalist, and lifelong gardener—will be teaching an online intro to vegetable gardening this spring. The course, “From Your Family to Your Garden,” includes seven two-hour classes, starting Feb. 26 and ending April 30. I believe Stephanie when she says, “You will learn everything you need to know to successfully grow herbs and vegetables in Florida and the Southeast.” She says she hopes people find the classes helpful, especially as we navigate these times of heartbreak, unrest, and political outrage. The course is $125, and you can pay in installments.

🦬Have You Read THE SEED UNDERGROUND?

If you are intensely interested in seeds, I invite you to read my book The Seed Underground, published by Chelsea Green of White River Junction, Vermont, 2012.

Gary Paul Nabhan, author of Restoring America’s Food Traditions and many other books, wrote this blurb for it: “What a dream of a book—my favorite poet writing about my favorite topic (seeds) and the remarkable underground network of growers who are keeping diversity alive on the face of this earth while putting delicious food on our tables! If books can move you to love, this one does.”

The book won more awards than any other book I’ve written.

• 2013 American Horticultural Society Book Award

• 2013 Nautilus Gold Book Award: Green Living Category

• 2013 ASJA Eisenberg Book Award

• 2013 Silver Award of Achievement

• 2013 The Green Prize for Sustainable Literature

• 2013 GWA Gold Award of Achievement for Best Book Writing

I have a few signed copies you can order from my website. $24 includes shipping. Or you can order directly from Chelsea Green Publishing.

🦬Consider a Residency at Oak Spring

Applications for residencies and fellowships at Oak Spring Garden, Bunny Mellon’s gardens near Upperville, Virginia, open February 14, 2026. They are designed for artists, botanical illustrators, writers, ecologists, plant science researchers, and plant conservation biologists, especially those working on creative projects. You can find more information at their website.

🦬Want to Read Gardening Substacks?

of Julie Witmer Gardens has created a Directory of Garden Writers on Substack. Warning: there are dozens and dozens of them. My favorite is my old friend of Plant People.

🦬Leave a Comment

Enter to win a copy of The Seed Underground and a packet of home-grown Seminole Pumpkin seeds by leaving a comment—any kind of comment—on this post. In a fortnight, on Feb. 12, 2026, I will put all commenters into an online Random Picker, and it will choose one recipient of the book and seeds. If I can find a copy of Raven’s foxglove seed packet, I will include that as well.

I’d love to hear about any of this:

• Are you growing a vegetable garden in 2026?

• Have you ordered seeds already?

• What’s your favorite seed company?

• Did you save any seeds in 2024 or 2025? Of what crops?

• Is there another book on seeds you really love? Please recommend.

• Have you completed a residency at Oak Spring Garden?

🦬Thank you for all you do for the Earth and its creatures, including us humans.

A Friday evening. He offers me a chair on the porch.

Concrete floor. Cinderblock wall of the house cool at my back.

Parking lot to the left. In the mornings, parents park.

Cross the street to the elementary school.

A drunken man sits in a swept yard to our right.

Clapboard house behind him in ruin.

He sends a wave over to us.

You know he used to play for the NFL?

I didn’t know that, I say.

Car horn. Man riding by on an old bicycle.

A woman crosses the street, stops to rest

on the stoop of a house. Part of the projects.

She can’t see us for potted plants.

Rows. Lined in front of his faded house.

Pots off the ground, on planks.

He grows herbs in his front yard to sell.

Thyme, lemon balm, spearmint, ginger.

Grows his garden too. Kale, squash, tomatoes.

A large tub of cucumbers on a pedestal.

How did you like Kunitz?

Everything I read increases my awe.

Did you read The Mound Builders?

Yes. And photocopied it.

He was in Macon for a residency.

So close, I say. Hard to believe

he was here, writing about our place.

A couple of skinny men walk up next door.

They carry their brown bags.

Laughter trails down the street.

Mornings must be nice. Crossing guard

helping the children get to school.

The happy calls of the children.

My legs stretch long in front of me.

We talk Plath, her toxic relationship with Hughes.

Baseball. When I was a kid, he says,

I wanted to be a poet or a baseball player.

I’ve typed up a few more poems. If you’d like

to read them. Mind you, I’m not a poet.

Never got to be a baseball player either.

But you can grow food, I say. Better than anybody.

I’d love to read your poems.

He’s on sabbatical from the liquor.

All of it is a moment. A chance taken, lost.

Never taken. I want to cry, I want to laugh.

This town I gave up on. Sun going down

past the health department. Scent of lemongrass

rising in the sundown. Fire barrel

next door starting to burn down the night.

Plath and Kunitz on a bag of potting soil.

🦬Writing Prompt

Isn’t it wonderful, the way…

🦬See You Next Week

Be wild, be well, be brimming with words.