I fear this may get mushy. If you’re not in that treehugging mood, look away.

The Holyoke ridge, looking west from Mount Tom.

This is maybe my favorite prospect in the valley, at my favorite time of year for prospects: when I’ve had six months to forget how beautiful the leaves are, and they come forth again as though for the first time in that pale, infant color and texture soft as skin. I think it has to do with contrasts. Over my shoulder to the right is Easthampton, with its towering old brick smokestacks haunted by nesting swallows. Over the mountain’s shoulder to the left, subsided metropoli full of factories similarly moldering and grey populate a long gradient into haze: Holyoke, Springfield, Hartford, New Haven. Behind me, the summit of Mount Tom, with its ruined Victorian hotel now surmounted by buzzing icicle cellular towers, satellite dishes and wry suicidal graffiti. But right here in front of me is this rippling swath of pastel-green, unpopulated nothing. What’s it doing there, looking like it just erupted from the fingertips of god? What right has it to go unlogged, undeveloped, undecayed?

Unlike pretty much every other place in this valley, I’ve never really had the chance to explore this particular nothing. Maybe that contributes to the mystery. Maybe I never will explore it, just so I can get this same feeling again every spring.

On the way back down across the sandy cut where the hotel’s telephone wires used to run, I ran into a Northern Oriole female–nothing special for most of you people maybe, but for some reason around here I rarely see them. I didn’t take a picture; there’s times when it just isn’t called for. But I crept up to within a few feet and we chirped back and forth at each other for awhile, heads cocked and frozen still. Then I thanked her and went on my way.

My newest centaur story, “The Circus of King Minos’ Masque”, went live last night at midnight in Beneath Ceaseless Skies issue #41–yes, those centaurs, the ones with the hallucinogens, the whiskey cellars and the lust for human flesh.

I read a little bit from this story at Boskone in February. It’s the second set in this world to feature Periphas, a human orphan raised by the lord of the centaurs. The third is purportedly to appear in Tales of Moreauvia #4 this fall.

It’s also the first time (at least that I’m aware of) that a story of mine has appeared for sale at the Kindle store–BCS has added a new feature where you can download individual issues to your fancy ereader thing from Amazon for a mere $0.99. Woo!

So many new and interesting ways for you to enjoy ye artfully airborne jewels of flying blood! How can you resist?

I’ll tell you one way you might resist–and that’s if you are not prepared to handle the goreporn and liberal guilt. These are still the same, bad old centaurs, and they are not for the squeamish.

This is Giambologna’s Hercules and Nessus.

Roaring Brook Falls, on the Mt. Toby reservation in Montague, MA. These icicles taste of moss and mineral salt.

Porcupine, Erethizon dorsatum. This guy lives on Graves Farm Reservation, the northwest side, where there is a maybe 100 foot deep ravine that has tons of broken rock and moss all up its sides. I love that ravine–I swim in the stream at the bottom sometimes–and I have met this porcupine there often. He never seems to like me any better, but he’s slow.

He is my mascot of the moment. Prickly!