Weekend planning is a prime time to apply the Deathbed Priority Test: On your deathbed, will you wish you'd spent more prime weekend hours grocery shopping or walking in the woods with your kids?

You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.

The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason.

To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.

There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter. One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues.

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.

Time after time ... today's crisis shrinks to next week's footnote to a newly headline disaster.