This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature

by Joanna Brichetto

Overview

Nature isn't only in a park or wilderness. It’s right outside our door Sometimes it’s on the door or comes inside to find us. Nature is the jumping spider on the screen, the assassin bug in the shower, and the cluster of ladybugs at the lamp. It is the moss on brick where gutters spill, a sycamore sprout in the storm drain, and the trash can lid turned into a bird bath.

Joanna Brichetto is a neurodiverse, late-blooming naturalist with a sharp eye. Despite having chronic illnesses, she spends much of her time exploring nature and has an infectious, almost zealous love for the flora and fauna near and in her Nashville home. In This Is How a Robin Drinks, Brichetto weaves observation, reflection, and commentary with unsentimental wit and an earthy humor into an urban almanac of fifty-two short lyrical essays.

Each piece offers a sketch of everyday wonders in everyday habitat loss. Nature is the dead sparrow in the pickup line at the elementary school, a full moon over the electric substation, and the cicada chorus that doesn’t make a days-long migraine any better (but doesn’t make it any worse either). Nature is under our feet, over our heads, and beside us—the very places we need to know first. Arranged by season, the pieces in this collection celebrate nature—just as it is—on the sidewalk and in the backyard, the park, and the parking lot.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595342997
Publisher:	Trinity University Press
Publication date:	09/24/2024
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Joanna Brichetto is a certified Tennessee naturalist and writes the urban nature blog Sidewalk Nature: Everyday Wonders in Everyday Habitat Loss. Her essays have appeared in Brevity, Short Reads, Ecotone, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Hippocampus, the Hopper, Flyway, the Fourth River, and elsewhere. She lives in Nashville. 

Read an Excerpt

How a Robin Drinks offers a new version of several old hunches: that by paying attention to the natural world we have a chance to figure out who, where, and when we are; that by getting to know the living beings around us, we come to a more sustainable vision of our place among them; that the more particular a story, the more universal; that suffering is inexplicable and unredeemable, but strangely useful to the imagination, and that nature is all around.

“Urban nature” is a complex and inadequate term for a complex and inadequate habitat.

We make more every day. We pave paradise as quick as we can, and even re-develop developed

land, where infill—in the name of density—makes scarce the creatures who had been able to eke

out a living. These are things we need to see clearly if we are to meddle productively.

Seeing clearly is how I “make shift with things as they are,” like Aldo Leopold in Sand

County Almanac. But who am I? Leopold was the father of wildlife ecology who spent weekends

in a cabin on degraded land, where he got his “meat from God.” I’m the mother of two who lives

by a sidewalk on degraded land, where I get my tofu from Trader Joe’s. But like Leopold, I

cannot live without wild things.

This is my almanac: sketches arranged by season, set in the backyard, the sidewalk, the

park, the parking lot, connected by urgent wonder. Not just the gob-smacked astonishment kind

of wonder, but wonder as in to ponder, to question. Both kinds of wonder lead to connect, which

leads to love, which leads to protect. We can’t protect what we don’t love, and we can’t love

what we haven’t met, and we can’t meet what is always someplace else, which is where many of

us think nature stays.

Nature is right outside our door, and here’s what I’ve learned: nature is the door too, and

what’s on the inside. Nature is the jumping spider on the screen, the assassin bug in the shower,

the ladybug at the lamp. Nature is moss on brick where gutters spill, is a sycamore sprout in the

storm drain. It’s a blue jay, it’s bur oak. Nature is a full moon over the electric substation, as

viewed from a bridge on the interstate. It’s red ants in the mailbox, a Red-tail on the steeple, and

pretty much everything at the next red light. Nature is under our feet, over our head, and beside

us—the very places we need to know first.

So let’s look around. Time is short. And none of us can live without wild things.

Table of Contents

TOC

Preface


Summer

Vocation

Dragonfly, Secondhand

Naked Ladies and Cicadas

Walking Onions

Paradise in a Parking Lot

Can’t Eat Just One

Devil’s Advocate

At a Red Light on Music Row

A Dandelion Is to Blow

It Was a Yellow-Billed Cuckoo

What a Butterfly Means

Fameflower

Why It Is Good to Go Outside Even If You Feel Like Hell

Ticked Off

Ghost Rain


Fall

Soccer Ecotone

Cotton Candy Is a Constant

Leaf Prints

Field Trip Leavings

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

Stinko Ginkgo

“Little Things That Run the World” in Late October

Nature’s Motel

Evidence

White Pine Smells Mighty Fine

Free, Sustainable, and Thematic

Compression

Eponymous

This Is How a Robin Drinks


Winter

Frostflowers

Liriodendron tulipifera

Hummingbird Winter

Because of the Dashboard

Winter Solstice

Raptor-Ready

Accidental Glade

Discontinued

Opportunity

Sidewalk Fig

Oh, Tannen-burn


Spring

Quiet Point

What White Tree Is Blooming Now

Bring Back the Bones

What a Robin Sees

Same Bat-Time

Pop Quiz, Late April

Sycamore Currency

True Nature

Samara

Catalpa Tree Verbs

Grandiflora Gesture

House Wren

Guided


Coda: Nature Lessons: How We Can Save the World

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"Smart, funny, and shot through with aching love, This Is How A Robin Drinks is both a call to action and a balm for the solastalgic heart. This profoundly beautiful, desperately necessary book will change the way you see the world and every living thing within it, including yourself." —Margaret Renkl, author of The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

“Inspiring and full of wonder. These vivid stories combine curiosity, wit, and a keen sense of the many ways that exultation and heartbreak mingle when we look closely at the everyday life of our yards, parks, and cities.”— David George Haskell, author of Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction

“Joanna Brichetto is a suburban Thoreau. In fifty-three crisp essays that can be read as daily meditation, she takes us to pocket parks, dead mall parking lots, and concrete canyons in pursuit of little ecological marvels. This collection is essential to understanding the need for widespread habitat protection and restoration and a reminder of the capacity and limits of nature to resist human destruction.”— Georgann Eubanks, author of Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction

“It would be hard to imagine a more delightful, engaging, and insightful introduction to urban natural history. Brichetto’s love of nature is infectious, and with a little luck it will go viral and infect us all. Her laugh-out-loud wittiness draws us in for more and reminds us to hit the pause button on our hectic lives as an antidote to the day’s news.”—Douglas W. Tallamy, author of Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard

"Joanna Brichetto loves her native planet—yes, our trashed twenty-first-century world—with passion and eloquence worthy of Walt Whitman or Annie Dillard. In her scintillating visions of urban nature, she follows a lost dragonfly through a Goodwill store, peers through a soccer game at the cicadas buzzing around it, and reports that a hummingbird’s heart beats so fast its body hums in her hand—all shared with novelistic detail and poetic precision. Brichetto’s love is not a warm fuzzy thing because this is not a warm fuzzy world. Her passion for nature is lusty, skeptical, disappointed, sacred, profane."—Michael Sims, author of The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man’s Unlikely Path to Walden Pond

"This is How the Robin Drinks" accomplishes in relatively few, transcendent words more than any in-depth natural history tome ever could, conveying how easy it is to look out for-or, alternatively, overlook-life in the spaces between. Nature needs no embellishment, and Joanna Brichetto’s exquisitely spare, poetic voice is its perfect match, guided by her quest for knowing and grounded in her awareness and compassion for both the human and more-than-human world. She is a gift to the trees, the bees, the bats, the birds and me—as well as anyone else who is looking for microhabitats of hope on a fractured planet. She is my new favorite nature writer.— Nancy Lawson, author of Wildscape: Trilling Chipmunks, Beckoning Blooms, Salty Butterflies, and other Sensory Wonders of Nature



There's power in unusual glimpses of the highways, parking lots, and backyards of urban America. Certified Tennessee Naturalist Brichetto, who shares her nature writing on the website Sidewalk Nature, compiles a series of humorous and educational short essays. "This is my almanac: sketches arranged by season, set in the backyard, the sidewalk, the park, the parking lot, connected by urgent wonder." Brichetto's keen eye peers at cicadas, admires the beauty of a vacant lot with asters growing in pavement cracks, and wonders about the purpose of dandelions—is a dandelion to blow, or is it, as Thoreau mused, "the sun itself in the grass?" Almost anything alive or dead merits Brichetto's curiosity, voiced in cocktail party–worthy chatter on everything from where cotton candy was invented to details of the author's personal life and how her children and husband live with her almost fanatical commitment to urban nature. To learn about maple samaras—those winged seed pods—from Brichetto is to share her devotion to keeping nature safe in our backyards. Barbara Jacobs, Booklist


“Joanna Brichetto is a city dweller and master noticer writing bite-size essays from an urban perch that teems with life and litter. She turns her eye equally on human things, plants, and animals, recording the disruptive truth of how we all exist in a single, entangled mosaic. ‘Our world is beautiful as it burns,’ she writes. Read and be enlarged.”
— Erika Howsare, author of The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Neighbors

From the Publisher