Aspen Grove Quotes

But as I get older I think – can it really be love if we don’t talk that much, don’t see each other? Isn’t love something that happens between people who spend time together and know each other’s faults and take care of each other? In the end I decide that the mark we’ve left on each other is the color and shape of love. That’s the unfinished business between us. Because love is never finished. It circles and circles the memories always out of order and not always complete. There’s one I always come back to: me and Cameron Quick, laying on the ground in an aspen grove on a golden fall day, the aspen leaves clattering and quaking the way they do. Cameron turning to me, reaching out a small and dirty hand, which I take and do not let go.

She has seen dieback across the West. Aspens are withering. Grazed on by everything with hooves, cut off from rejuvenating fire, whole groves are vanishing. Now she sees a forest, spreading across these mountains since before humans left Africa, giving way to second homes. She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans, at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

Olivia had also told her that all these trembling aspen trees were connected, one big organism joined by a root network underground. If you cut a tree up on this ridge, the others down in that grove would know. She wondered if they would all feel the pain of an ax strike at once.

You have a thing for staring at me, don’t you?” she says softly. “Can you blame me when you’re so goddamn beautiful?” “You really shouldn’t say things like that to me.” “Why the hell not?” I challenge. “Because you’re my boss,” she reminds me with a hint of that sass I love so much.

Beautiful prairies, bordered by lofty hills sparsely scattered with timber, stretch around. The massive fronds of the Pinus Ponderosa replace the elegant leaflets of the Cedar, no longer found save rarely, perchance, in some deep dell moistened by a purling streamlet. Groves of aspen appear here and there. The Balsam Poplar shows itself at intervals only, along the streams. The white racemes of the Service-berry flower, and the chaste flowers of the Mock Orange, load the air with their fragrance. Every copse re-echoes with the low drumming of the ruffed Grouse; the trees resound with the muffled booming of the Cock of the Woods. The Pheasant shirrs past; the scrannel-pipe of the larger Crane -- ever a watchful sentinel -- grates harshly on the ear; and the shrill whistle of the Curlew as it soars aloft aides the general concert of the re-opined year. I speak still of Spring; for the impressions of that jocum season are ever the most vivid, and naturally recur with the greatest force in after years. -- Alexander Caulfield Anderson describing the new brigade trail between Lac la Hache and Kamloops.

Pauline Trio One could sing October rain, and one had a gift for plain chant and prayer, a domain unsettled by love or its intimate other. What fits with this theology no one dares to say. These twins so perfectly in tune must know "the modesty of nature," the perfect art and texture that sustains the other name. Paris could not be the frame for loyal Romans, their shame worn upon their bodies light as air, and nothing is quite as endurable as death. Those who have taken this path move with an abiding breath. Such a common dance this dense intention of love's expense. Keep this for that special hour when the Roman drops his sour gift for abandoned splendour; et c'est la nuit, the footfall that troubles that other Paul. I have learned the felicity of fire, how in its wake something picks at buried seed. Think this a most festive deed, nature's mistake, borrowed flare of a village dance, satire of the sun's course, light you read through waste, repair. Death had freed that first opaque habitation (what a widening gyre), an aspen ache, a lustrous scar that might lead to a hidden grove, or breed astonishment in its loss; all entire, a shaping breath proposes its own pyre. Solitude guides me through this minor occasion; moon is my mentor, one on a spree. This notion, night's philanthropy, courts my favor. Devotion, love's predecessor, sings its tidy discretion. Such gentility reins all vigor, all caution.

Anne Rightler. She lives at Aspen Glen, an assisted living home, but Nora invites her for dinner once a month and on holidays. I don’t think she wants her climbing the stairs.

Aspen groves blazed like flares on the slopes. Whole copses of hundreds of separate trees, but all joined together underground by a single root. An aspen wood was all one organism. The largest living thing on

Aspen groves blazed like flares on the slopes. Whole copses of hundreds of separate trees, but all joined together underground by a single root. An aspen wood was all one organism. The largest living thing on earth.

for the typical man to appreciate, it was the sight through the upper door that was equaled by none. The San Juan Mountains stood tall against the horizon and walled off the surrounding aspen groves that were alive and in full bloom with early autumn colors. Clouds drifted miles away and miles above, gracing the clear blue sky with their company and casting shadows across rolling hills that were dominated by the greens, reds, and golds of a Colorado paradise. The majestic view threatened to take hold of their attention, but Adam and his boy were there to finish what they had started two days earlier, and their eyes were focused on the tree line below.

On the highest slopes, the small leaves of the aspens quaked. And we listened to them-they were such exposed things holding on and making vulnerable, fluttering music-and this quaking gave us a peaceful feeling. We stood there thinking of nothing except leaves, leaves, leaves. Or standing in this grove brought out the melancholy in us, and we felt a rush of sadness, in our throats, in our stomachs, in our necks, but it, too, was not attached to any one thing in particular. It was just this, the aspen leaves, not falling, but making the sound of holding on.

Dylan might think of me as the color in his life, but he’s the brushstroke and the canvas in mine.

After the Disaster A picnic in the sequoias, light filtered into planes, and the canopy cut through. Fire raged in that place one month ago. Since I’d been there, I’d have to see it burning. Nature of events to brush against us like the leaves of aspens brush against each other in a grove full of them carved with the initials of people from the small weird town hikers only like for gas. Messages get past borders—water across the cut stem of the sent sunflower alive with good intentions. People who mistake clarity for certainty haven’t learned that listening isn’t taking a transcript, it’s not speech the voice longs for, it’s something deeper inside the throat. Now, from the beginning, recite the alphabet of everything you should have wanted, silverware, a husband, a house to live in like a castle, but I wanted fame among the brave. A winter night in desert light: trucks carving out air-corridors of headlight on the interstate at intervals only a vigil could keep. Constellations so clean you can see the possibilities denied. Talking about philosophy might never be dinner but can return your body to a state of wonder before sleep. The night reduced us to our elements. I wanted water, and whatever found itself unborn in me to stay alive.

Last semester, when I asked my class, as I do each quarter, how many of them had ever spent a night sleeping in the wilderness the answer was zero, and I realized for the first time in my teaching life I might be standing in front of a room full of students for whom the words “elk” or “granite” or “bristlecone pine” conjured exactly nothing. I thought about the books that had shaped my sensibility as a young writer: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Silent Spring, A Sand County Almanac, Refuge, A River Runs Through It, In Patagonia and Desert Solitaire. Now, amid the most sweeping legislative attack on our environment in history, a colleague wondered aloud to me whether it was feasible, or even sane anymore, to teach books that celebrate nature unironically. This planet hadn’t even been mapped properly a couple of hundred years ago, and now none of it, above or below ground, remains unsullied by our need for extraction. As we hurtle toward the cliff, foot heavy on the throttle, to write a poem about the loveliness of a newly leafed out aspen grove or a hot August wind sweeping across prairie grass or the smell of the air after a three-day rain in the maple forest might be at best so unconscionably naïve, and at worst so much part of the problem, we might as well drive a Hummer and start voting Republican.

When I ask Beth Lund what will keep that finger of fire from backing down the hill toward the ranch when the winds clock around to the south, she knows exactly who I am and where I live. “Your little aspen grove at the back of your property will save you,” she says. “Aspen trunks are all full of water. I’d rather have a 100-acre stand of aspen between me and a fire than a line of the best hot shots in the business.” It’s all I can do not to hug her. It’s all I can do not to burst into tears.

If land and religion are what people most often kill each other over, then the West is different only in that the land is the religion. As such, the basic struggle is between the West of possibility and the West of possession. On many days it looks as if the possessors have won. Over the past century and a half, it has been the same crew, whether shod in snakeskin boots or tasseled loafers, chipping away at the West. They have tried to tame it, shave it, fence it, cut it, dam it, drain it, nuke it, poison it, pave it, and subdivide it. They use a false view of history to disguise most of what they are up to. They seem to be afraid of the native West—the big, cloud-crushing, prickly place. They cannot stand it that green-eyed wolves are once again staring out from behind aspen groves in Yellowstone National Park. They cannot live with the idea that at least one of the seventeen rivers that dance out of the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada remains undammed. They are disgusted that George Armstrong Custer’s name has been removed from the name of the battlefield memorial, the range of the Sioux and Crow and Arapaho, replaced by a name that gives no special favor to either side: the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Worse, the person now in charge of the memorial is an Indian.

You make me feel things I've never experienced before.

Tell me you're not attracted to me, and I'll stop. Say the word. Presley, and I'll walk away

In Montana summers, anything feels possible. Grassy green pastures stretch for miles with the yellow field of canola flowering in late June, contrasting the deep blue skies. Billowing gold castles of clouds tower overhead, subsiding late into the late before the shower of stars began to emerge. Spotted fawns nurse from their mothers while flights of hummingbirds dive and skitter thought the aspen groves in search of nectar. The summers, a rich bounty after having lasted the many months of winter, are magical but brief.