Notes on the Landscape of Home
“If you pay attention to the land where you live, you enter into conversation with it, until it becomes a voice inside you, and some of the boundaries between you and it dissolve,” write Susan Hand Shetterly. In this collection of elegant, spare, and often passionate essays, Shetterly explores what it is to live in a Down East coastal town, and to pay attention, over time, to what it offers of land, water, wildlife, and community. She takes her cue from Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Berry, who advocate for the virtues of staying in one place, believing that as we delve deeper into the landscape of home the more we learn about the world.

As in many other places, this particular home place is in trouble. Shetterly celebrates the work of communities to restore environments their people know and love, and takes a closeup look at what is changing and what has been lost. Among her subjects are the reestablishment of the bald eagle, the reintroduction of the American turkey in Maine, and the turkey vulture’s northward trend. She also writes about shorebird migrations, the bluefin tuna and the humpback and right whales in the Gulf of Maine, counting alewives along a stream in the spring, seaweed cultivation in a bay, a forest’s rebirth, the island that gave her the imaginative space she needed, and more. She recounts how she and her neighbors kept each other company at a distance during the long months of the pandemic, and she celebrates coastal culture, its particular, deep history that anchors a person’s sense of place.
1140493691
Notes on the Landscape of Home
“If you pay attention to the land where you live, you enter into conversation with it, until it becomes a voice inside you, and some of the boundaries between you and it dissolve,” write Susan Hand Shetterly. In this collection of elegant, spare, and often passionate essays, Shetterly explores what it is to live in a Down East coastal town, and to pay attention, over time, to what it offers of land, water, wildlife, and community. She takes her cue from Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Berry, who advocate for the virtues of staying in one place, believing that as we delve deeper into the landscape of home the more we learn about the world.

As in many other places, this particular home place is in trouble. Shetterly celebrates the work of communities to restore environments their people know and love, and takes a closeup look at what is changing and what has been lost. Among her subjects are the reestablishment of the bald eagle, the reintroduction of the American turkey in Maine, and the turkey vulture’s northward trend. She also writes about shorebird migrations, the bluefin tuna and the humpback and right whales in the Gulf of Maine, counting alewives along a stream in the spring, seaweed cultivation in a bay, a forest’s rebirth, the island that gave her the imaginative space she needed, and more. She recounts how she and her neighbors kept each other company at a distance during the long months of the pandemic, and she celebrates coastal culture, its particular, deep history that anchors a person’s sense of place.
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Notes on the Landscape of Home

Notes on the Landscape of Home

by Susan Hand Shetterly
Notes on the Landscape of Home

Notes on the Landscape of Home

by Susan Hand Shetterly

Hardcover

$22.95 
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Overview

“If you pay attention to the land where you live, you enter into conversation with it, until it becomes a voice inside you, and some of the boundaries between you and it dissolve,” write Susan Hand Shetterly. In this collection of elegant, spare, and often passionate essays, Shetterly explores what it is to live in a Down East coastal town, and to pay attention, over time, to what it offers of land, water, wildlife, and community. She takes her cue from Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Berry, who advocate for the virtues of staying in one place, believing that as we delve deeper into the landscape of home the more we learn about the world.

As in many other places, this particular home place is in trouble. Shetterly celebrates the work of communities to restore environments their people know and love, and takes a closeup look at what is changing and what has been lost. Among her subjects are the reestablishment of the bald eagle, the reintroduction of the American turkey in Maine, and the turkey vulture’s northward trend. She also writes about shorebird migrations, the bluefin tuna and the humpback and right whales in the Gulf of Maine, counting alewives along a stream in the spring, seaweed cultivation in a bay, a forest’s rebirth, the island that gave her the imaginative space she needed, and more. She recounts how she and her neighbors kept each other company at a distance during the long months of the pandemic, and she celebrates coastal culture, its particular, deep history that anchors a person’s sense of place.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781684750290
Publisher: Down East Books
Publication date: 09/01/2022
Pages: 200
Product dimensions: 5.76(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

Susan Hand Shetterly is the author of Settled in the Wild and Seaweed Chronicles: A World at the Water’s Edge, as well as several children’s books including Shelterwood, named an Outstanding Science Trade Book for Children by the Children’s Book Council. Shetterly has received a nonfiction writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and two grants from the Maine Arts Commission. She lives in Surry, Maine.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

A Beginning

1 Children of Orion 3

2 Apprenticeship 7

3 Little Moose Island 13

A Sheaf of Days

4 Wonderful Things 21

5 The Surry Forest 23

6 North Bend Road 27

7 Ode to an Apple Tree 29

8 Spring Rain 31

9 A Walk on the Heath 35

10 Leaving the Land 37

11 The Preserve 41

The Strangest Fishpond

12 In Dreams Begins Responsibility 51

13 The Beautiful Bones 55

14 The Whales' Gifts 61

15 A Winter Garden 67

Time Alone

16 Becoming a Flock 81

17 Happy, Happy Hours 85

18 Interesting Times 89

19 Poor Joanna 93

20 Time Alone 97

21 The Map 101

Forerunners

22 The First Years 115

23 The Gift of Birds 119

24 Into Wildness 127

25 A Sneeze 133

26 Learning to Speak 135

The Lives of Birds

27 Home on the Range 145

28 To Catch the Morning Sun 147

29 Going to See the Ducks 153

30 A Homecoming 157

31 At Dusk 171

32 The Gull 177

Acknowledgments 185

About the Author 187

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