Cover to Cover: Suburban Safari, A Year on the Lawn by Hannah Holmes

Earth Day is this weekend. Are you looking for a reading companion to help in your celebrations? I suggest Suburban Safari.

Something about Holmes' curiosity of her back yard that is really intriguing to me. In many ways, this book is simply a narrative of what she observes and experiences while rummaging through her yard: digging holes, climbing trees, looking to the skies, and sharing her home with a befriended squirrel. But really it's an environmental history. As simple as this book may seem, this is a very powerful work of literature.

No doubt, this book reeks of something that I would like. Not just the subject matter, but also in the way that Holmes tells her story. As an aspiring writer, I admire the way she really brought me into the yard with her, giving such passion and vigor to what she is writing about.

"They're embattled organism, my trees. Their fruits are stolen, and day after day, their leaves are eaten alive. They're absolutely crawling with herbivores who want a piece of them. I climb a stepladder into my oak and perch among the low branches. At first glance, the leaves are a rich forest-green, laced with bright veins that put me in mind of lighted highways seen from an airplane at night. The same principle creates both patters, I suppose: A main artery divides and divides again, to deliver resources to the humblest town or leaf cell." (p. 154)

Watching: Independent Lens, PBS
Reading: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy