Octavio Solis > Recent Status Updates

“Out in the shady place back of my cabin snow still lies under a shaggy spruce like a dingy white collar on a man who needs a hair cut. Spring is gaining, to be sure, but the tattered white patches in the woods on the north slopes of Cache Lake hills show that winter is not leaving without a fight.”

“Suddenly the winds stops as if someone had shut a door, and the snow that was streaming across the window drifts straight down in dead silence for a little time. During a quiet spell in the blizzard that night I heard the scream of the big Canada lynx that lives and hunts in the Great Tamarack Swamp at the lower end of the lake. Once you hear that sound, you never forget it.”

On a cloudy late afternoon, when the birds are quiet and the dog crave their twentieth nap, it’s good to curl up in bed with this book and read about how to collect sap from the sugar maples.

What a charming book. It harkens to an earlier age with its guileless intent and its accompanying illustrations both instructive and amusing. This is not my usual fare, but it feeds some ancient pith in my soul. It’s January.

What a charming book. It harkens to an earlier age with its guileless intent and its accompanying illustrations both instructive and amusing. This is not my usual fare, but it feeds some ancient pith in my soul. It’s January.

Such rich prose, lyric and precise, from a man hardly anyone knows. This is a treasury of nature memories.

Perfect prose stylist at work here. Telling a story with such economy.