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By MICKI COLBECK

Folks living anywhere near the town borders of Strafford have long been aware that Coburn’s General Store is our social hub. When the virus stopped cultural gatherings in the Upper Valley, we got by, having Melvin and the gang at our neighborhood...

By MICKI COLBECK

The air felt chilly — jacket weather, with the November sun breaking through just enough to show off the green mosses and wood ferns along the path. A couple chickadees, a nuthatch and a downy woodpecker worked the trees above looking for food. A...

By MICKI COLBECK

The equinox has come— 12 hours of day and 12 of night— as if Vermont were in the tropics. The little brown dogs (LBDs) and I sit on the old velvet couch, which in an earlier life, was red, but has since faded to mauve, and is slouching towards the...

By MICKI COLBECK

Years ago, I lived in southern Missouri, on the ancient, weathered-down, pink granite hills of the St. Francois Mountains. In my extended family were some serious campers and fly fishermen, with well-prepared gear and routines. Southern Missouri is...

By MICKI COLBECK

Why are the orchids here? I park my car along the Class 4 road by a kiosk on Hemenway Road and walk up the trail into our Strafford Town Forest, which had been donated in the 1960s by a local doctor. I feel comforted by the presence of tall old trees...

By MICKI COLBECK

Early on, I noticed that my legs were sturdy like my brother’s — Irish legs, short and strong, close to the ground, better perhaps for digging potatoes and clearing rocks, as my grandparents may have done. While my teenage friends seemed to dance...

By MICKI COLBECK

The two little brown dogs and I crossed over our river, the West Branch of the Ompompanoosuc, a couple of weeks ago for a hike up into the rich woods nearby. We headed uphill to the fir swamp where my favorite liverwort— handsome woolywort grows. How...

By MICKI COLBECK

The dogs and I walk out along the West Branch of the Ompompanoosuc every morning through hayfields and riparian forests. A few days ago, I felt like yelling, “Wake up, wake up,” at every living thing. It looked like the snow might really be gone....

By MICKI COLBECK

The people in the Ompompanoosuc valley used to love their river — good fresh water for gardens and drinking, and a beautiful thing to look upon, but then she changed. She became faster and stronger and destroyed the things people built, who then...

By MICKI COLBECK

It is Imbolc, the time for lambing, seed catalogues, and garden sketches. Groundhogs and bears are stirring. The sun lingers on the western hills, listing just a bit more to the north each afternoon. We are at the halfway point between the longest...

By MICKI COLBECK

The little dogs and I went for a hike yesterday. We go hiking most days, but this one was different. I had been feeling tense and distracted from some conflicts in town in which I was a major player. Hiking trails versus snowmobile trails. It was...

By MICKI COLBECK

“Let’s wade out here. I feel sure we’ll find some Isoetes away from shore.” our instructor, botanist Robbin Moran said joyfully as we followed him into the lake, pants rolled up, magnifiers in hands, heads down. We were searching for an elusive,...

By MICKI COLBECK

Sitting on a grassy patch where the clean tea-colored water begins, the lake is flat, calm, wide, the color of blue pewter, the morning sun just showing behind clouds, the air quiet. The gang of ten, as I call the loons that have gathered off to the...

By MICKI COLBECK

I love to go hiking. I’m always game for a walk in the woods. There are so many ferns and flowers and mosses and rocks to identify and so many birds and frogs to hear. We now have a new place on the edge of town for hiking and nature walks. The trails...

By MICKI COLBECK

February has been an icy month, a challenge for those who count on skiing the powder and harder on those already unsteady on their feet. Perhaps this February’s full moon should be called the “plaster moon” for all those broken bones.This morning, as...

By MICKI COLBECK

There is a term in ecology used to describe the sharing of scarce resources by various species. This survival strategy, resource partitioning, occurs across the animal kingdom, and I suppose, if one looks at fungal connections, between plants as well....