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Nature isn't only in a park or wilderness. It’s right outside our door Sometimes it’s on the door or comes inside to find us. Nature is the jumping spider on the screen, the assassin bug in the shower, and the cluster of ladybugs at the lamp. It is the moss on brick where gutters spill, a sycamore sprout in the storm drain, and the trash can lid turned into a bird bath.
Joanna Brichetto is a neurodiverse, late-blooming naturalist with a sharp eye. Despite having chronic illnesses, she spends much of her time exploring nature and has an infectious, almost zealous love for the flora and fauna near and in her Nashville home. In This Is How a Robin Drinks, Brichetto weaves observation, reflection, and commentary with unsentimental wit and an earthy humor into an urban almanac of fifty-two short lyrical essays.
Each piece offers a sketch of everyday wonders in everyday habitat loss. Nature is the dead sparrow in the pickup line at the elementary school, a full moon over the electric substation, and the cicada chorus that doesn’t make a days-long migraine any better (but doesn’t make it any worse either). Nature is under our feet, over our heads, and beside us—the very places we need to know first. Arranged by season, the pieces in this collection celebrate nature—just as it is—on the sidewalk and in the backyard, the park, and the parking lot.
"Smart, funny, and shot through with aching love, This Is How A Robin Drinks is both a call to action and a balm for the solastalgic heart. This profoundly beautiful, desperately necessary book will change the way you see the world and every living thing within it, including yourself." —Margaret Renkl, author of The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
“Inspiring and full of wonder. These vivid stories combine curiosity, wit, and a keen sense of the many ways that exultation and heartbreak mingle when we look closely at the everyday life of our yards, parks, and cities.”— David George Haskell, author of Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction
“It would be hard to imagine a more delightful, engaging, and insightful introduction to urban natural history. Brichetto’s love of nature is infectious, and with a little luck it will go viral and infect us all. Her laugh-out-loud wittiness draws us in for more and reminds us to hit the pause button on our hectic lives as an antidote to the day’s news.”—Douglas W. Tallamy, author of Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard
"Joanna Brichetto loves her native planet—yes, our trashed twenty-first-century world—with passion and eloquence worthy of Walt Whitman or Annie Dillard. In her scintillating visions of urban nature, she follows a lost dragonfly through a Goodwill store, peers through a soccer game at the cicadas buzzing around it, and reports that a hummingbird’s heart beats so fast its body hums in her hand—all shared with novelistic detail and poetic precision. Brichetto’s love is not a warm fuzzy thing because this is not a warm fuzzy world. Her passion for nature is lusty, skeptical, disappointed, sacred, profane."—Michael Sims, author of The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man’s Unlikely Path to Walden Pond
— Erika Howsare, author of The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Neighbors
TOC
Preface
Summer
Vocation
Dragonfly, Secondhand
Naked Ladies and Cicadas
Walking Onions
Paradise in a Parking Lot
Can’t Eat Just One
Devil’s Advocate
At a Red Light on Music Row
A Dandelion Is to Blow
It Was a Yellow-Billed Cuckoo
What a Butterfly Means
Fameflower
Why It Is Good to Go Outside Even If You Feel Like Hell
Ticked Off
Ghost Rain
Fall
Soccer Ecotone
Cotton Candy Is a Constant
Leaf Prints
Field Trip Leavings
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral
Stinko Ginkgo
“Little Things That Run the World” in Late October
Nature’s Motel
Evidence
White Pine Smells Mighty Fine
Free, Sustainable, and Thematic
Compression
Eponymous
This Is How a Robin Drinks
Winter
Frostflowers
Liriodendron tulipifera
Hummingbird Winter
Because of the Dashboard
Winter Solstice
Raptor-Ready
Accidental Glade
Discontinued
Opportunity
Sidewalk Fig
Oh, Tannen-burn
Spring
Quiet Point
What White Tree Is Blooming Now
Bring Back the Bones
What a Robin Sees
Same Bat-Time
Pop Quiz, Late April
Sycamore Currency
True Nature
Samara
Catalpa Tree Verbs
Grandiflora Gesture
House Wren
Guided
Coda: Nature Lessons: How We Can Save the World
Acknowledgments