Wendell Berry’s Politics of Coming Home
\n\nWhen I got the news last night that Wendell Berry had died, I was on my front porch with my dogs and my daughters. We had been inspecting a large brown toad who was wandering among the stones in the front yard.
\n\nToads spend the summer feasting, fattening themselves for the long winter they will spend burrowed beneath the frost line. Spiders, slugs, worms, and insects are digested into vital stores of fat. By the time September arrives, the summer’s work is visible. This particular toad was so large that my smaller dog, a miniature Goldendoodle, refused to approach it. My daughter Rose laughed and pointed out how amazing it was that humans had bred wolves into fluffy fearers of amphibians.
\n\n“You were kings of the forest and the prairie once,” she told the doodle. “We did this to you, out of love.”
\n\nOur talk of nature and our role in it was interrupted by the arrival of a text message bearing a link to an obituary. It was for the poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, protectionist, and immigration restrictionist Wendell Berry. He had died at 92 in his Kentucky.
\n\nI put my phone away.
Original source: https://www.breitbart.com/economy/
