Take a man in perfect health, and let him assert against the general opinion, and you will find such man accused of deviancy, or error, or madness.

even for a region with a long history of underpaying for land that belongs to other people.

And yet to have claimed that a warm spring morning walking over earth carpeted with apple blossoms was somehow the same, substantively, spiritually, as a cold winter noon spent pruning, or a harvest evening heavy with the smell of juice and hay—this would have betrayed an ignorance not only of country life, but of the thousand seasons—of frogsong,

Between 1970 and 2019 alone, nearly a third of all birds had disappeared from North America.

To mourn a lost friend, however, is not the same as wishing for another.

As for Alice, her grievances were less specific and less spoken of, for they included Mary ruining her life.

She notices. Indeed, she has no demands but noticing.

But then, standing in the bedrooms of such righteous people, he’d see the muslin drapes and calico skirts, and to his many hates, he added that for the pious who preached the slave’s equality, but wore cloth made with his sweat.

she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.