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redforkhippie

Several years ago, while living in Southern Illinois, I fell in love with a little publication called The Waterman and Hill-Traveler's Companion. It was published by Jim Jung, who owned the late, great Hillside Nursery in Carbondale. WHTC is a terrific little almanac that includes day-by-day listings of natural events. It would be worth the price of the almanac (about $6) just to find out when the chorus frogs are going to start singing in Makanda. I've been known to plan road trips around that event in the past.

When my husband and I moved to Red Fork -- a blue-collar neighborhood in west Tulsa that lies roughly between Route 66 and Lookout Mountain -- in the summer of 2004, I tried desperately to find a similar publication covering northeastern Oklahoma.

I came up empty, but I finally hit upon a plan: I would simply keep my own records about what was going on every day in my neck of the woods so that maybe, in a few years, I could make an educated guess about when the scissortails would return to their perch on my chimney and the tree frogs would return to my pond.

This is also a cope mechanism. I don't like winter. I tolerated it better when I could open WHTC and think about what sort of life was stirring in the Shawnee National Forest on a bleak, icy day. Maybe if I take five minutes a day to probe my back yard for signs of life, the cold won't seem so bad.

New Year's resolution 2006: Let the recordkeeping begin.