Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days.

Indeed, if "biology is chemistry with history," as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love.

True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.

The question of whether it's God's green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.

Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?

Men often compete with one another until the day they die. Comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor.

City people try to buy time as a rule, when they can, whereas country people are prepared to kill time, although both try to cherish in their mind's eye the notion of a better life ahead.