Orion November / December 2015

A REGULAR SUBJECT of discussion at home lately has been housekeeping, and the importance of it. And so we’ve been making a practice of organizing shoes, putting away toys, making beds, keeping the dog hair at bay. Every time I announce that housekeeping is about to begin there is a cascade of questions about why we are keeping house. I always answer the same way: because it feels good to take care of our home. That everyone doesn’t subscribe to this belief becomes apparent the minute we leave the driveway and make our way into the wider world. Roadside litter, strip malls, and uninspired housing developments make plain that taking care of home is not exactly at the top of humanity’s to-do list. A few minutes with Google Earth, which…

Ingo Arndt has traveled the globe for twenty-five years, photographing animals and their habitats. His work has been published in GEO, National Geographic, BBC Wildlife, and other magazines. Belle Boggs is the author of Mattaponi Queen, a collection of short stories. Her essay in this issue of Orion is adapted from her new book, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood, which will be published next year by Graywolf Press. Ann E. Coulter’s drawings and paintings are inspired by the prairie landscape of the midwestern United States. She holds degrees in fine art from Illinois State University, San Diego State University, and Bradley University. Ben Goldfarb’s journalism has appeared in High Country News, Earth Island Journal, The Guardian, and other publications. He received a master’s degree in Environmental…

Toward the end of her haunting, rich, and challenging piece on killing and eating her own food (“The Chicken Project,” July/August 2015), Gina Warren writes, “I want to eat intelligible food and feel satiated, not consume blindly and feel empty.” There are many kinds of blindness, just as there are many ways to consume. Her essay is not an instruction manual for moral perfection, but a window into the mind of someone navigating a moral quandary we all face. I find it brave. DOUGLASS ST. CHRISTIAN Stratford, Ontario Several years ago, I made a choice similar to Gina Warren’s. In order to eat meat, I felt I had to involve myself more tangibly in the food chain, which meant learning to kill a chicken. I thanked the chicken for what…

1. A good staff is handy in the mountains, as is a bottle of wine, as is the rising moon. 2. Dangling a fishhook off a flat rock in the middle of a river for all eternity may or may not be possible but it’s worth a try. 3. It’s better to be addicted to moss than wealth, sex, or fame. 4. Few joys rival walking an old path in new weather. 5. A cloud can eat ten thousand pines, an entire valley, the sky, and your name. 6. A cloud can also be worn as a jacket. 7. Even when clouds are metaphors they remain clouds. 8. Ditto for ringing bells. 9. Trust ferns. 10. On a calm lake at night one can row a small wooden boat across…

THE TALK of my neighborhood here in tiny Hancock, New Hampshire, has been the whereabouts of the Flock of Eight. They’re a flock of wild turkeys who, until around Thanksgiving last year (a perilous time for turkeys), roosted each evening in the tall pines behind our house. We loved to see them pick up the fallen fruit beneath the ancient apple trees in our field, walking with stately grace. At dusk, we looked forward to the unlikely and joyous sight of these huge birds, weighing up to twenty pounds and standing up to four feet tall, heave their dark bulk one by one up into the sky. We neighbors would compare notes every day or so to keep tabs on the flock. Rick Simpson saw them hopping over the stone…

ON A RECENT Saturday morning in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, throngs of joggers, tourists, and gutter punks streamed through a thousand acres of trails, gardens, and picnic groves — but I was there for the weeds. As I hovered over a patch of lamb’s quarters by Lincoln and Fifth Avenue, I recalled tasting some a few weeks earlier at a farmers’ market, the plants’ dusty leaves covered in a powdery white film, with spiky clusters of tiny flowers and red-streaked stems. I was surprised by how delicious they were: a more flavorful, hearty, and textured spinach. Subsistence on a weed — an unwanted but abundant wild plant — appealed to me. I was determined to forage my own, but did not want to make a mistake and die by…