This Is How a Robin Drinks

Auteur

Joanna Brichetto is a certified Tennessee naturalist and writes the urban nature blog Sidewalk Nature: Everyday Wonders in Everyday Habitat Loss. Her essays have appeared in Brevity, Short Reads, Ecotone, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Hippocampus, the Hopper*, Flyway, the *Fourth River, and elsewhere. She lives in Nashville. 

Résumé

Nature isn't only in a park or wilderness. It’s right outside our door. Sometimes it’s on the door or comes inside to find us. Nature is the jumping spider on the screen, the assassin bug in the shower, and the cluster of ladybugs at the lamp. It is the moss on brick where gutters spill, a sycamore sprout in the storm drain, and the trash can lid turned into a bird bath.

Joanna Brichetto is a neurodiverse, late-blooming naturalist with a sharp eye. Despite having chronic illnesses, she spends much of her time exploring nature and has an infectious, almost zealous love for the flora and fauna near and in her Nashville home. In This Is How a Robin Drinks, Brichetto weaves observation, reflection, and commentary with unsentimental wit and an earthy humor into an urban almanac of fifty-two short lyrical essays.

Each piece offers a sketch of everyday wonders in everyday habitat loss. Nature is the dead sparrow in the pickup line at the elementary school, a full moon over the electric substation, and the cicada chorus that doesn’t make a days-long migraine any better (but doesn’t make it any worse either). Nature is under our feet, over our heads, and beside us—the very places we need to know first. Arranged by season, the pieces in this collection celebrate nature—just as it is—on the sidewalk and in the backyard, the park, and the parking lot.

Contenu

TOC

Preface

Summer

Vocation

Dragonfly, Secondhand

Naked Ladies and Cicadas

Walking Onions

Paradise in a Parking Lot

Can’t Eat Just One

Devil’s Advocate

At a Red Light on Music Row

A Dandelion Is to Blow

It Was a Yellow-Billed Cuckoo

What a Butterfly Means

Fameflower

Why It Is Good to Go Outside Even If You Feel Like Hell

Ticked Off

Ghost Rain

Fall

Soccer Ecotone

Cotton Candy Is a Constant

Leaf Prints

Field Trip Leavings

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

Stinko Ginkgo

“Little Things That Run the World” in Late October

Nature’s Motel

Evidence

White Pine Smells Mighty Fine

Free, Sustainable, and Thematic

Compression

Eponymous

This Is How a Robin Drinks

Winter

Frostflowers

Liriodendron tulipifera

Hummingbird Winter

Because of the Dashboard

Winter Solstice

Raptor-Ready

Accidental Glade

Discontinued

Opportunity

Sidewalk Fig

Oh, Tannen-burn

Spring

Quiet Point

What White Tree Is Blooming Now

Bring Back the Bones

What a Robin Sees

Same Bat-Time

Pop Quiz, Late April

Sycamore Currency

True Nature

Samara

Catalpa Tree Verbs

Grandiflora Gesture

House Wren

Guided

Coda: Nature Lessons: How We Can Save the World

Acknowledgments