I have been reading Notes from Turtle Creek, the collected essays of Ted Browning that appeared in The Kennett Paper in 1986 and 1987, collected and published by the Brandywine Conservancy in 1991. Each short chapter describes a natural phenomenon Browning observed on his family farm or around the familiar places of Chester County. It’s a bittersweet read, since Browning is gone and many of the natural places he describes have been paved over. He laments what had already been destroyed by the 1980’s; if he only knew what has been lost since!
Nonetheless, I enjoy any book that helps interpret the natural world immediately around us. And the two decades that have passed since its writing give a sense of the cyclical passage of time, personally as well as in the wild areas of Chester County. Twenty years ago I had a different understanding of nature, hadn’t chosen a career in this field. But still the cycles of cicadas, spring peepers, heat waves and late-season snows, predators and prey, about which Browning writes, were happening all around us.
