Settling In Gently

  A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There by Aldo Leopold My rating: 5 of 5 stars Reading Aldo Leopold makes me miss my husband. He was a man misplaced in time-- a range scientist in the tropics, a high desert island boy. He packed his bow and his orange vest and hunted grouse in Utah sage brush and Aspen stands, and his knife and dogs and mule to hunt boar and goat in Hawaiian jungle. He loved the way civilization-- well, maybe "civilization" is giving us too much credit-- the way humans and our funny way of doing things-- shaped landscape. As Simon Schama waxes syntactical, there is no such thing as a true wilderness. At this point in time, every place in nature is being shaped and reshaped by human impact. Aldo Leopold understands contradictions: he loves to hunt and he mourns the wolf he killed as a young man. He is a careful and hard working farmer on a shitty piece of land, and he is an evolutionary biologist who can describe the way agricultural management

  Well. Here we are. The computer screen is bleary as I type. My right eye doesn’t blink so I have to anoint it with thick goo. My open eyeball stubbornly faces the muzzle of the eye-gel, watches the distended drop descend. Never have my eyes been so brave. Amazing what paralysis does. I watch the drop fall onto my vision and then I pinch my eyelid together with my fingers to mimic a blink. My eye doesn’t care. It stares me down even as I try to tape it closed or cover it with an eyepatch. It just stares stubbornly into the dark. My eyelid does twitch, though. A little hitch of involuntary movement, like a dead frog kicking under the knife. Makes sense, those amphibious nerves have died. If “Died” is too dramatic a word, then -- they have been amputated. Pinched off and killed like a lizard’s tail.  My right ear is… strange. Imparied. As though I’m listening to the world from under the water. As if all of the sounds are flattened to be at the same level of intensity/volume/forefront/ba