Sap buckets on maples; The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry; Scott Chaskey’s This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm; Masanobu Fukuoka’s 自然農法•わら一本の革命 (Natural Farming: One-Straw Revolution; Lady Eve Balfour; more.

Ecclesiastes; George R. Stewart’s The Earth Abides; Mary Shelley’s The Last Man; M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”; Nevil Shute’s On the Beach; Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises; Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn! (to Everything There Is a Season)”; Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (Nausea); Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again

A black swallowtail butterfly at Maya Lin’s “Storm King Wavefield”; Lewis Mumford’s essay, “Quality in the Control of Quantity,” in Natural Resources: Quality and Quantity; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Der Zauberlehrling”; Dragon Langerie beans.

John Lindmark’s bookstore in Poughkeepsie; Hidden History of the Lower Hudson Valley by Carney and Tatiana Rhinevault; Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury; A Short History of the Shadow by Charles Wright.

Metro North along the Hudson; Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”; Jorge Luis Borges’s “El libro de arena” (“The Book of Sand”).

Pollepel Island; Thom Johnson’s and Barbara H. Gottlock’s Bannerman Castle; Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; H.C. Engelbrecht’s and F.C. Henighen’s Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Arms Industry; George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara; Matthew Coolidge’s Up River: Man-Made Sites of Interest on the Hudson from the Battery to Troy; Shaun O’Boyle’s Modern Ruins: Portraits of Place in the Mid-Atlantic Region; Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.