Tales of a Whimsical Wanderer

May 20, 2017 Estell Manor Park  Out fly the fairies in the night, and in their groups, away they troop to make merry beneath the pale moonlight. They zoom and zip past shrub and tree, and through the fog, they spy a bog, which they splash right into with utter glee. And straightaway the games begin: splishing, splashing, kicking, thrashing, the fairies laugh and share many a grin. They play around like wild otters, but after a while, out they file, leaving fairy dust clouding the water!

May 14, 2017 Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, NJ Two geese with all their ducks in a row . . . Egret What do you see? Seagulls and . . . their strange cousins? Action shot! Sandpipers Silly goose Ospreys on their nest

April 20, 2017 Estell Manor Park THE RUINS OF a munitions plant lay hidden near the bank of a river in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. The plant, now only a broken shell of crumbling brick walls with empty windows and doorways, had once been filled with activity—as well as explosives—during the Great War. A century later, nature has reclaimed her land—but the memory of the past yet remained, ingrained in each leftover brick of the former plant. The nearby river appeared completely ordinary, flowing calm and smooth and blue—but, oh, what it must have witnessed over the decades, the centuries! The river watched as the munitions plant was built, brick by brick; the river watched as workers labored to birth deadly, unforgiving weapons; the river watched as the building fell into decay and the woods slowly but inexorably asserted their ground once more. . . . The ruins of a powerhouse and, beside it, a still-bubbling artisan well kept the former munitions ...

March 10-11, 2017 IT WAS THE wanderer's last full day in London. After a breakfast at the corner cafe (as per usual), the wanderer went on a search for souvenirs. She stopped at a supermarket for tea and chocolate, then went next door to Skoob Books, where she browsed and sat in a chair in a nook surrounded by towers of books and read the beginning of a Neil Gaiman novel. And then it was time for a final round of museum visits. The wanderer strolled through Sir John Soane's Museum, an eclectic collection, with marble Greek statues , old oil paintings, a huge sarcophagus . She then traveled through Ancient Egypt (more sarcophagi!), Rome, Europe, and other realms at the British Museum. Her professor then took her and her companion on a short literary London tour, pointing out buildings in which famous writers like Virginia Woolf, T.S. Elliot, and W.B. Yeats lived and wrote. After a dinner of pesto pasta and bubbly sparkling water at an Italian restaurant, the wanderer saw...

March 7-9, 2017 IT WAS TIME to go to work. The wanderer returned to the King's College, which was situated near the bank of the Thames. The wanderer had gone to the college the previous evening for her professor's guest lecture event and her companion's accompanying performance, which the wanderer had been helping her practice for the past few months. Afterwards, they all had had a dinner of overpriced pizza with a few of the professors at the college. She and her companion had been the only ones at the table not wearing glasses. The wanderer had felt rather like a child invited to eat at the grown-up table, but she nevertheless had enjoyed listening in on the scholarly, spectacled conversation. For the next few days, it was the wanderer's turn to be scholarly (though still not spectacled). She and her companion were researching a British historian/writer/politician/military officer—quite a busy bee—named C.M. Woodhouse. The wanderer and her companion spent hours an...

March 6, 2017 TODAY, THE WANDERER was going to Kensington Gardens. She could hardly believe that, less than a year since she had first read J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens , she was going to the place where, in the world of fiction, a baby Peter Pan was raised by birds and experienced his first adventures; the place where J.M. Barrie himself had wandered through; the very place that his brilliant mind had transformed into a magical world filled with fairies and talking birds and joyful children, a little Neverland in the middle of the sprawling city of London. For her, it was nothing short of a dream come true. The weather was gorgeous: no heavy coat necessary. Clouds rolled through the blue sky without threatening a drop of rain. The flowers were already in bloom, and even though it was only the first week of March, spring was in the air. "The Serpentine begins near here. It is a lovely lake, and there is a drowned forest ...