Posts by skincarematt

I’ve been a book person my whole life but I never was much of a margin scribbler. Sure, I had used highlighters as a kid and underlined things here and there but I was more of a visual recollector. I could sort of see in my mind where on the page things were that I…

It has been told that one of the subtle violences committed by modern missionaries in Central America was to force indigenous people to abandon their traditional homes of bundled grasses skimcoated with mud for cinder block houses with corrugated metal roofs. The missionaries insisted that these new houses were better because they would last longer…

The Jacaranda is concussively beautiful tree. Seeing one or seeing a host of them together gets your eyes drunk with a purple wine that is hard to conceive of. The luminous quality of their purple, lilac, and lavender blooms seems to be interior to the petals. You might even say that the saturation of the…

There is an awful lot to like about Robert Frost’s poem “Birches” but the first three lines will do for now: When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. It is such a sweet vision. That those trees…

Four thousand years ago in Crete ancient fisherman left huge crushed shell middens of a particular kind of sea snail in massive piles in spots in their old cities. We aren’t completely sure what those middens were a sign of but there is a very good guess. Three thousand years ago in ancient Phoenicia, those…

I have never surfed. Or ever really tried. I’ve swam in the ocean. I’ve body surfed. And in my youth I used boogie boards on loan from time to time. And I’ve loved the ocean and I have loved surfing movies and video clips and I’ve loved watching from the shore too. How easy it…

In the last few days a friend sent me this image above. He thought I would like it. And I did. But it was sent without any sense that it had any meaning beyond “this is a cool image.” Being on the receiving end of an image like this can set you to either quickly…

I came across these two prayers for pig hunters recently… ‘Dear Lord. May all dogs be blessed with your grace. To all who wander the fields and forests, may you guide them safely back to camp. Thank you for the blessing of hog meat. Let the hunters always remember it is a gift from you.…

The last few days have brought the biggest snowfalls in New York City, where I live, in quite some time after many years of quite mild winters or at least light on snow. One of the tiny consequences of these storms have been the flipping over of one of my planters where I have grown…

If you live in the northern half of the United States or Canada you will know that the trees there produce fruit, seeds, and nuts that hang out all winter. Sometimes still on the branches and sometimes on the ground at the base of the trees. Trees produce different amounts from year to year based…