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Observations from My Walk in the Woods

May the forest be with you

John Egelkrout
5 min readFeb 4, 2024
Coyote tracks crossing our pond. Author’s photo.

I live on a small, four-acre farm with my wife. We bought this place about six years ago when we moved from the Minneapolis area to be closer to our grandchildren. On our land is a house made of rock, a small barn, a spring-fed pond, a stream, two fields, and a small patch of woods.

Four acres is not a lot of land. It is a lot larger than lots I see in the city or the suburbs, but nowhere near as large as some of the commercial farms in the area. For us, it is just the right amount of land to have a small organic farm.

We’re not organically certified because it is too much of a hassle with the FDA to get certified, so we bill ourselves as “almost organic.” That’s good enough for us.

For as small as our farm is, I never get tired of walking around it. Just like the saying “You can never go to the same river twice,” so too with our farm. It never looks quite the same no matter how many times I walk around it. Sometimes I walk in the grass and other times in the snow. In the winter the sun is in the southern sky, and in the summer it is overhead. The pond is frozen over in the winter, and the home to peepers, bullfrogs, turtles, and a lone muskrat in the summer.

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John Egelkrout
John Egelkrout

Written by John Egelkrout

I am a sanity-curious former teacher who writes about politics, social issues, memoirs, and a variety of other topics. You can also follow me on Substack.

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