Greetings from the Porch,

Earlier this week I went ice fishing. Today I plan to tap our maple trees. We seem to be at a turn of the seasons.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about poverty, progressives, and publics.

• Sarah Harley describes her experience immigrating to America and coming to be at home in a new place: "When I walked back out into the chilly Milwaukee air, I felt a steadiness settle inside me—a sense of being at home in a place I had chosen, and that had, in its imperfect way, chosen me back."

• Will Lyon ponders what's gone wrong with college football and suggests some ways to restore its original goods: "While these changes all have a common motivation – money – they come at the expense of the things that make college football worth watching: education in virtue, connection to place, shared traditions, longstanding rivalries, and the chance to watch college students who also happen to be excellent athletes compete."

• Taryn Chan searches for patterns and contemplates the ways we stitch together meaning: "Some days I am a fifteen year-old girl standing in a disused alleyway, waiting for the broken glass at her feet to rearrange itself into a complete mosaic, waiting for it to mean."

• Christian Holmes commends the benefits of reading and interpreting allegory: "Allegory demands a certain level of attentiveness, and it prompts the reader to grow in the habit of more sustained and contemplative searches for meaning."

• Jon Schaff reviews a new book on post-liberalism and is rather unimpressed. But he does pose some important considerations for all those who weigh in on the liberalism debates: "While the book has moments of clarity, it is ultimately frustrating and unpersuasive. If I were to add a subtitle, it would be Post-Liberalism: A Guide for the Uncurious."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about birds (and discusses his love of corvids) this week.

I finally got around to savoring James Rebanks’s The Place of Tides. Rebanks spends a spring on a Norwegian duck island with two older women who allow him to help them make duck huts, protect the nesting ducks, and gather the precious eider down. As Casey Spinks observes in his review, the book is a shift of sorts from Rebanks’s writings about farming and tending sheep in England’s Lake District. But this beautiful story testifies to a difficult fidelity, to becoming the kind of person who is capable of tending fragile lives in fragile places. Near the end, he articulates the humility that Anna, the story’s protagonist, embodies:

The island and the wild things are never fully known. There is no end to learning. Anna knows that and now, so do I. When we were young, the old folks seemed to know everything. I’d imagined that there was a moment when you felt wise, that you had learned it all. She looks over at me, smiling as though she can hear the thought. We are all just children. We never know enough, not even the half of it.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro