Flying with Uncle Wiggily . . .

Saturday, April 25, 2026. It's the Satyr's day . . . Strong thunderstorms are in the forecasts for Green Country and TulseyTown, likely this afternoon, extending into the evening and ending around midnight.

To plant a garden, to create a wetland—these seem like small acts in the face of our world of concrete, our obsession with never-ending economic growth. – Ragan Sutterfield, “Hospitality on Our Earth Home,” Meditations, at The Center for Action and Meditation, 4.24.26

Lots of birthday reminders in today’s mailbox —

U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser is 87 today. He was born in 1939 Ames, Iowa.

It's also the birthday of Al Pacino who is 86 today. The multi-laureate-awarded actor was born in 1940, New York City.

And, novelist Padgett Powell turns 74, born in 1952 Gainesville, Florida.

Edward R. Murrow was born on this day in 1908, Greensboro, North Carolina. He was the most influential and esteemed figure in American broadcast journalism during its formative years.

It’s the birthdate of singer Ella Fitzgerald. She was born in 1917, Newport News, Virginia.

The author of the Uncle Wiggily stories, Howard R. Garis, was born in Binghamton, New York (1873). By the time he retired, he had written more than 10,000 stories about the rabbit and his silk top hat.

In 1959, one of the largest civil engineering feats ever undertaken, the St. Lawrence Seaway, officially opened, linking the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes.

On this day in 1990 the Hubble Space Telescope was placed in orbit by the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery, changing the course of modern astronomy.

Flying at Night

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.

Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies

like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,

some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,

snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn

back into the little system of his care.

All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,

tug with bright streets at lonely lights like

his.

– Ted Kooser, From Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985, University of Pittsburgh Press. 1980.