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" Our family was like no one else's. My schoolfriends had fathers and grandfathers and uncles who did things, but in my family, women had been the doers. "

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" I spend a lot of time sizing up a tree before I fell it. Once it's down, I clear away the brush around the tree before I start cutting it into lengths so I won't trip and lose my balance with the chain saw running. "

" I am an early riser. "

" I am beekeeper, but I am also a writer, and some years ago, I sat down at a typewriter to experiment with words, to try to tease out of the amorphous, chaotic and wordless part of myself the reason why I was staying on this hilltop in the Ozarks after my first husband, with whom I had started a beekeeping business, and I had divorced. "

" Bees are easier to keep than a dog or a cat. They are more interesting than gerbils. They can be kept anywhere. "

" I started collecting crickets to study them. Now I expect they will be my companions for many years to come. "

" It gets cold here in the Ozarks in the winter. There are often warm winter days, but there are also weeks when the temperature never climbs above freezing. "

" For a long, long time, nearly 40 years, I never had any bees. I can't think why. "

" It wasn't that there weren't menfolk in my grandmother's stories. There were lots of them but they died young or were drifters and dreamers who disappeared or turned to drink or succumbed to melancholia or slow mortal diseases. The women, on the other hand, lived a long time and were full of spit and vinegar until the end. "

" I know a number of coastal trails in downeast Maine, all of them interesting. "

" Greer is Missouri's second-largest spring. It is a place of pounding, frothing waters and of greeny-cool moss-covered rock, a place of fern and cliffy splendor. "

" Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals. "

" Every spring, I begin cutting my firewood for the upcoming winter. It should be cut months ahead of time so it will dry and cure. "

" Strictly speaking, one never 'keeps' bees - one comes to terms with their wild nature. "

" Sometimes, I wonder where we older women fit into the social scheme of things once nest-building has lost its charm. "

" I've never been much for becoming a member of a group. "

" Great Wass Island Preserve is a 1,579-acre Nature Conservancy jewel, a place of spectacular botanical interest, and Jonesport is situated on a postcard-pretty harbor. Tourism is not serious business in those parts - boat building and fishing are - and there are no signs telling how to get to Great Wass. But I know. "

" Our human calendars take little notice of such dates, but nighthawk migrations tell of shortening days and a season's end. "

" A rule about portages: the longer and harder they are, the fewer people will make them. "

" Crickets are immaculately clean, harmless animals. "

" Late August still feels like summer here in the Ozarks, but it is the time of year the nighthawks are moving on to their South American wintering grounds. "

" Otherness is what I have always liked about bugs. "

" Fiddling with the genetic identities of domesticated plants and animals ever since we had become human. We are the fiddlingest animal the world has ever seen. "

" The Ozarks are old and worn mountains from the geological past. "

" We humans are a minority of giants stumbling around in a world of little things. "

" Healthy camel crickets spend a lot of their waking hours grooming, so I have learned to recognize the ones that will soon die because they walk about encrusted with sand and bits of litter, having lost all interest in keeping clean. "

" You have to take springtime on its own terms in the Ozarks: there is no other way. It can't be predicted. It is unsteady, full of promise, promise that is sometimes broken. It is also bawdy, irrepressible, excessive, fecund, willful. "

" All chain saws are formidable and dangerous. "

" Precision, directness, and quickness are what human beings are good at. What we have never been good at - in our past, at least - is figuring out the impact, the consequences, of what our skills have allowed us to do. "

" My maternal grandmother, Annie Sparks, lived with our family during the while I was growing up. When I came home from school, after having made a detour to the kitchen to pour a glass of milk and fix a thick peanut butter sandwich on easy-to-tear white bread, I would go up to her sitting room. "

" My crickets found me. "