The Other End of the Driveway contents

Midsummer Maine
Blue Wanderers
Hummingbirds
Noiseless, Patient Creature
A Creature from Near the Beginning of Time
A Rainbow in the Eye of the Beholder
Food for Thought
Midsummer Flowers
Of Goldenrod and Galaxies
Stars and Flowers
Alchemical Yellow
The Song of the Invisible Whip-poor-wills
Felis Catus I: 600 Million Problems
Felis Catus II: Naming Conventions
Butterflies
Web Weavers
The Ticks Don't Care
Out of the Howling Darkness
Star-Struck
Ancient Predators
The Inner Life of Spiders
Nature Beyond the Books
The Urge for Staying
Time Hurries On
The Most Brilliant of All Tangible Things
September
October Light
Halloween Time
Late November
The Great Bear in Maine
West Meets East: A Talk with a Monk
Science and the Bible
Teaching the American Weirdoes
Night Speech
A World of Words
The Deeps of Time
Intimations of Fractality
The Pleroma
A Place Where Houses Are All Churches
The June in Juniper
White Christmases
Making Sense of What's Out There
Unwelcome Wanderers
Shake, Rattle and Roll Over
Winter Trees
Freezing Point, and Beyond
The Snow Grumbler
Winter Moons
The Implicate Order of Snow and Seed
The Amateur Naturalists
Awakening from Winter
At the Other End of the Driveway
Springtime
Evidence of Colossal Things Unseen
Here Comes Everybody Again
Spring Song
Passive Landscaping
Bluets in the Middle
The Inner Life of Toads
Country Matters
The White Goddess
Within a Budding Grove
Longevity of Individuals

"With a naturalist's curiosity, a journalist's penchant for accuracy, and an expert writer's command of language and distrust of sentimentality, Wilde turns his attention to the natural world around him. His collection of short essays ... reminds us to live in awe of spiderwebs, stars, and the backyard."

"The amateur naturalists of the world, and no doubt some professional naturalists, are basically hopeless romantics. We are constantly getting the sometimes reassuring, sometimes creepy feeling that something big is going on beyond the pulp and chemistry of a fir tree, or a snowflake, or a meadowsweet blossom.
"The signs are practically everywhere. They pop into your mind's eye for a moment, like glints of light on wavetops, as sudden recognitions of likenesses between unlike things. Some are so obvious you barely notice them. Spring is like the beginning of life, a baby. Summer is like the fullness of life, an adult. And winter is like death, the bare trees. Only to turn again to spring, it has been repeatedly observed. �
"The amateur naturalists, especially Thoreau, crystallized for us the idea that the natural world is not just a raw material, but a glimpse of forces larger than us. A fact, Thoreau observed in one of his essays, is meaningless until it blossoms into a truth.
"What truth he was talking about is hard to get in focus. But we could never get free of the idea because it's bouncing off the firs themselves."