The photograph above is of a nine-spoked wheel, a relic from Tim’s boyhood farm in western Minnesota that is now lodged in our back garden, blooming with rust.

This image connected for me with a book I have enjoyed dipping into again and again. Printed in 1964, Hal Borland’s Sundial of the Seasons collects 365 of the nearly 1,200 nature essays he published in The New York Times between 1943 and 1963. Essays are arranged by season, beginning with March 22, with one brief piece for year day of the year.

As Borland reports, these pieces accummulated little by little over two decades. One initial essay on oak trees, published in 1941, a turbulent season for the whole globe, eventually became “more than a third of a million words.” Daily activities do add up. Borland’s other credits include other collections of essays, two considerations of folklore, three novels, and a collection of poetry entitled America Is Americans. I have never encountered his other work, but I keep this collection, this almanac of observations and questions, to remind me that the natural world never goes out of style.

Context for Poem “Relentless” (April 22, 2026):

I suppose, if pressed, I would say that the context for today’s poem is the collision of the human and other-than-human natural worlds.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE