A Samise Health Update

Samwise is smiling again, playful again, adoring the world and our place in it again. You’ll notice how spiffy he and Emily look. They have not looked better in a few years. This is thanks to a new groomer.

Yesterday was one of those sing-song June days where the sun was warm and the breeze cooling. The feasting black flies and mosquitoes were swept away by the wind, at least for a few hours, and the river had a healthy flow after this weekend’s rains. The sky would have been a perfect postcard background if not for the haze from Canadian wildfires. They’ve polluted New England’s air for the past week.

The smoky sky was not all bad, though. It added a patina to the woodland scenes, as if we were walking through a painting by Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, or any number of the White Mountain Artists of the 1800s.

The air, dense with smoke, faded this scene like an old painting from the nineteenth century artists who flocked here.

It’s been difficult to escape the chaos and tumult of current events inflicted on us in firehose fashion daily, but that only makes our woodland jaunts and river swims even more essential.

Not a day goes by when we don’t see another pillar of our country under assault. Libraries, museums, public schools, universities, national parks and monuments, science, media, medical research, environmental protections, and national history are constantly assailed. Meanwhile, the National Weather Service, soon to be stripped of even more money and staffing, has issued the first-ever heat advisory for Alaska.

For those aware and free from tribal political views, it is a never-ending assault on our senses. It’s difficult to witness.

I’ll always stand in the corner of the underdog, whether that is the disenfranchised individual; the loneliest great blue heron; bees who are disappearing so people can have the prettiest, most sculpted lawns; bears, moose, bison, and mountain lions; or flowers, rivers, and trees. Someone has to speak out for the Earth and against the profiteers.

Idiot politicians and those in bed with industrialists and those who don’t care about the future we’re leaving the next generations mock such concerns. But Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us of what we’ve forgotten from the pages of her book, Braiding Sweetgrass. Ecology is just another word for home.

“The word ecology is derived
from the Greek oikos, the
word for home.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer