by Natalie Ogbourne | | Pondering Life Outside
The springtime landscape in rural Iowa wears a mosaic of ever-deepening swaths of green broken by plots of freshly turned fields and charred black ditches. Growing up, I saw the burns and wondered why people, including my farmer-grandparents, endured the stress of...
by Natalie Ogbourne | | Pondering Life Outside
The twelve-passenger van made its way down Yellowstone’s snow-covered road not on traditional tires, but on treads meant to traverse the groomed roadway. Gone were the crowds and the fly fishermen of fall, replaced by seas of white broken by swaths of evergreen and...
by Natalie Ogbourne | | Pondering Life Outside
Summer’s green is wearing thin. Before long, it will give way to the colors of autumn. Some years, summer’s heat and its green march across the lawn arrive with a suddenness that suggests we’ve gone straight from winter to summer with no stop for spring. This...
by Natalie Ogbourne | | Pondering Life Outside
Because the things of earth end, because beginnings arrive disguised as endings, because this week brings both to our family in the form of college–a repost. It made sense when I was young. The cicada’s song signaled school’s imminent return. I enjoyed school,...
by Natalie Ogbourne | | Pondering Life Outside
Summer mornings, I walk the gravel line between the drone of highway traffic and the twitter of birds in the pasture. A road that knows few cars and fewer houses, its ditches prosper rabbits and bees and the birds which lay down my...
by Natalie Ogbourne | | Navigate by Faith, Pondering Life Outside
Once in a while, we encounter the remains of a colossal tree on the trail. Sometimes we find an immense trunk laying on the ground rather than stretched to the sky. Usually, though, it’s a remnant of a root system tipped into the air that gets our attention. We...