Cover photo by Kim Glover, a beautiful old oak tree in Austin, TX taken 100 years ago in March of 2019.
We’re fans and supporters of The Shoofly Magazine here at Glover Gardens, because a.) it keeps us apprised of the happenings in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, where our Gumbo Cove getaway is located, b.) it’s always an enjoyable read, and c.) the excellent editor reached out to me personally about my story, Epic Seafood Boil Memories from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi and ran it in the magazine. How could we NOT be fans?? 😍
There’s an article in the latest issue of The Shoofly that I’d like to share with you. It beautifully captures the seemingly oppositional characteristics of nature and our relationship with it: peaceful but unpredictable, soothing, but sometimes dangerous.
The author of the article, James Inabinet, said, “If anything ‘is what it is,’ it’s wild Nature. Its ways are not our ways, its purposes not exclusively ours. This is the real Nature, the mother of all her children in their evanescent beauty and sublime wildness, even the spiders, ticks, snakes, and falling trees. She contains and holds them all.”
Read his story of a tree falling just feet away from his peaceful perch here: The Real Nature.
Falling tree stories have a particular resonance at Glover Gardens. It happens here. Too frequently.
Our tree-falling story from 2016, complete with quite a few pictures of the multiple mighty ones that fell on our house, captures only one of the three times in 12 years that trees have given up and gone down here. We have a beautiful, pine-laden lot, but sometimes, our trees don’t feel like our friends. They are magnificent, shade-giving and peace-inspiring, but, like many other things in life, uncertain, which was the point of The Real Nature.
Thank you to James Inabinet for his beautiful story. I hope you read it.
© 2020, Glover Gardens
