Lessons on Moving

My life has been one big box of junk for the past three months. I’ve posted enough about that move. If you’re like me and you’re behind on your blog reading, here’s a list of my previous posts. Just click on the title to read. Thoughts on Moving Saying Good-bye Mountain Living Mindful Monday –

Happy #Earth Day – Pay Dirt – #Composting

Happy Earth Day 2015! Celebrating Earth Day is a little bit like giving canned goods to the homeless at the holidays as if that’s the only time the food is needed. Same with Earth Day. We get all warm and fuzzy inside thinking about doing things to help the environment, but then May comes along, and

Winter Gardening Blues and Greens

Usually by this time of year, hubby happily starts a multitude of seedlings and places them under grow lights in anticipation of planting time. It’s different this year. He’s planted a few seedlings–onions, greens–but nothing like in years past because this year our house and, of course, our garden are for sale. We don’t know

Great News as Earth Day Anniversary Approaches

By Patricia Zick @PCZick Environmental stories usually leave me frustrated and disappointed – with both sides. But not today. Finally, I read something that gives me hope for civil discourse in this country on the issues that matter most. If we’re all shouting at one another to make our point, who’s listening? In western Pennsylvania,

Another Dangerous Side to Fracking

By Patricia Zick @PCZick I don’t usually post on Sundays, but I wanted to share this series of articles from the Beaver County Times. Saturday’s story explores “brine” or wastewater disposal. Sunday’s piece (not yet posted online) profiles a driver of one of the trucks hauling away the wastewater. The disposal of what comes out

Glaciers create landscape drama

  By Patricia Zick @PCZick When my daughter visited me recently, I wanted to show her some of western Pennsylvania’s landscape without driving very far. Serendipity intervened by delivering to my mailbox “The Sylvanian,” the Sierra Club’s Pennsylvania chapter’s magazine. An article on Slippery Rock Gorge offered me a solution. A forty-mile drive from Pittsburgh,

A Love Affair with Birds

By Patricia Zick @PCZick My grandmother taught me a love of birds many years ago back in Michigan. She had a bird feeder right outside the window so she could see it from her chair in the living room. She kept bird books on the table there and I loved to visit her in the

Ohio River Watershed Celebration – Eleven Years of Good Stuff

By Patricia Zick @PCZick Rivers are vital to our lives. For decades, as we grew into an industrialized nation, we gave little regard to what we put into those rivers. Now, we understand we cannot destroy what gives us life. As a result, many of our rivers are slowly improving as we balance the needs

Fallingwater – the melding of nature and man

  By Patricia Zick @PCZick There’s a missing element from the photos of Fallingwater in western Pennsylvania. The sound of Bear Run resounds through the trees as it races over rocks to meet the Youghiogheny River in the valley below Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece of organic architecture. Roaring waterfalls echo throughout the inside and outside

A View from the Creek

Raccoon Creek May 2011 By Patricia Zick @PCZick Raccoon Creek winds for nearly thirty miles through the foothills of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania. During its course through valleys and woodlands, it picks up several tributaries flowing down the hillsides before it dumps into the Ohio River thirty miles northwest of Pittsburgh. We recently kayaked