Concrete and Cardinals

Scott Turner’s brief articles in The Providence Journal always provided welcome glimpses of natural landscapes. Beauty in the Street – Nature Tales from the Neighborhood collects many of these, as well as other reminiscences of Turner’s life and its intersections with the natural world in Rhode Island, Seekonk, and the Bronx. It’s not a book that you’ll read cover to cover. Instead enjoy a snippet here and there; the timeline is fragmented. One piece titled, “Sitting with Several Species of Butterfly,” dated 2012, begins, “On a sunny Sunday afternoon in summer, I lazed on a lounge chair in the shade of a red maple…” The next piece is three years later in Seekonk, finding Turner standing “in amazement before a dolphin, which surfaced less than 10 feet away, exhaling in a loud, sighing hiss from its blowhole.” This is a collection of essays to dip into on a cold day, or when it’s raining outside, or when you need a smile to connect you with birds and the water, the air and the wind. Beauty in the Street – Nature Tales from the Neighborhood by Scott Turner, available on Amazon and at Stillwater Books.