David Walbert: Unhewn Stones

The victory of the grass

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 08:12:34 -0400

The city laid a sidewalk between a broad clear street and a park where once there was a grassy shoulder: of all the places to lay a sidewalk, the least disturbing of existing patterns and the least improving to the lives of pedestrians. On the park side the ground slips quickly down the brushy bank of a stream and is protected by a railing that makes one feel not safer but more exposed to traffic, should there ever be any. But it has made the shoulder harder to mow, and come April the grass beyond the railing grew baby-stroller high and went to seed. An unusually perceptive baby might have noted the diversity of seed-heads: upright and drooping, sparse and thickly clumped, tall and short, single and multiple; graced by gravity with cacophonous curves and by breezes with mismatched rhythms. The desire for order only squeezed chaos to the margins and concentrated its beauty. But no one sees the victory of the grass except the babies, for they are the only ones not looking at their phones.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 09:18:40 -0400

Perennial grains in the news! If you are one of those people who like to mutter about how the agricultural revolution of 10K BC was bad idea, this is one way forward. If you want to try them at home you can buy Kernza flour here, among other places. It makes good muffins.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:49:05 -0400

When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird.

When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf.

(Wendell Berry, c. 1969)

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:29:59 -0400

James Rebanks:

On one level, clearly, a drought is just bad luck, the savage will of the gods. If it doesn’t rain for long enough, then every farming system grinds to a halt. But the severity of how drought affects a place is shaped by how it has been managed before. And the fact is that a lot of British farmland is now being farmed so efficiently — in monocultures, and fed with synthetic nutrients — that often it has quite low levels of soil organic matter. Now, this can work fine in years where there is plenty of moisture. But over time, we also know that degraded soils dry out quicker in droughts.

The Rothamstead Institute estimates that every 1% increase in soil organic carbon raises the soil’s water holding capacity by about 354,000 liters per hectare: enough to fill five swimming pools. It isn’t how much rain falls from the sky, in other words, but how much we can hold in our soils that really matters.

Systems, in short, can be too efficient; fields need some buffer, some untapped potential, that they can call on in periods of stress and exhaustion. But our farming systems are being asked to run flat-out all the time. There is no slack, and very little resilience. The basic problem is that the economics of agriculture don’t pay for soil organic matter, or for farmers to rotate crops, or to let land have periods of recovery. In practice, that means that most of our arable landscapes are now poorly adapted for extreme weather events.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 13:03:10 -0400

Repainted what is essentially my studio bathroom, formerly my daughter’s bathroom, which I had permitted her to paint bright salmon pink. Color yes, pink no. It was the most annoying room I have ever painted—all obstacles, no room to maneuver—but it’s done, and now I get to build a wall cabinet.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 10:04:51 -0400

View from my driveway after the wettest July since the 1930s

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:58:53 -0400

Speaking of buying things: The very last straw for me with SquareSpace was discovering that without my choice or even knowledge it was now possible to buy, via my website, a $30 spreader in four easy payments of $7.50. Make a new plan, Stan. We’re finished.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:53:14 -0400

Why is it that there are more items for sale on the internet than protons in the sun but I cannot find the thing I actually want

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 09:57:43 -0400

Challenge: Create a two hour setlist of cover songs appropriate for a farmers market busker that does not contain any songs you have ever heard sung or played at a farmers market.

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:29:27 -0400

This one is titled “To Me the Converging Objects of the Universe Perpetually Flow,” which is what happens when you fill the time between customers at the craft market reading your pocket edition of Walt Whitman and doodling.

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:20:33 -0400

This is, I don’t know what. Reptilian love child of Pennsylvania Dutch and Zuni?

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:10:19 -0400

Recently there have been several major mathematical breakthroughs enabled entirely by AI: both proofs and counterexamples to long-held conjectures. Ordinarily I read about this sort of ting with interest. Now I find I simply don’t care. Mathematics may have its uses but it is not interesting because it is useful; it is interesting because it is beautiful. The pursuit of mathematics is valuable not because it is important to be right but because the pursuit of it is beautiful. It is not like having a cure for cancer and not minding where it came from. It is the difference between watching a dancer and watching a computer simulation of a dance. If it isn’t human, to hell with it.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 15:51:58 -0400

At Roy Underhill’s window-making class, 2022… At the end of the first day he went around the room sweeping the entire class’s shavings to each bench and took these faked photos.

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:00:00 -0400

Facing the usual early-July glut of cherry tomatoes I made confit: basil leaves in a baking dish, a layer of whole cherry tomatoes, a few crushed cloves of garlic, a liberal sprinkle of salt and enough olive oil to come about halfway up the tomatoes. Roast at 325F for maybe an hour until slightly brown on top and wrinkled.

I was afraid I was wasting two pints of tomatoes but honestly the result is one of the best things I have ever eaten. (Though I do say that about once a month.) The confit went into a couple of half-pint containers in the freezer, whence I’ll have pasta sauce in a couple of months when the season is over.

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:43:17 -0400

“It is any thing but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum.” —Hawthorne

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:17:39 -0400

New woodworking website is live.

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 08:31:37 -0400

When I finished Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers last month I wanted to post something here more than the “finished reading” flag that feels like awarding myself a medal; but I didn’t get around to it. Read Morten Høi Jensen’s review instead, and then do read the book:

For the most part, they are characters we only ever know socially, as it were, either in dialogue or by their consumption of goods. Yet by fixing the narrative in their various households and domestic concerns, Tergit’s novel rebels against the remorseless one-way traffic of history. Here, banal instances of private life jostle against political turning points. Tergit’s novel rescues those moments that history would not only fail to record but would obliterate the memory of….

Naturally, it is difficult to read Effingers without also reading the Holocaust back into its pages, yet the novel frustrates this response by the sheer abundance of life it evokes. Tergit, writing to a publisher in 1949, was adamant that what she had written was “not the novel of Jewish fate.” If that’s all it was, it might be of only historical interest, yet who among its twenty-first century readers could fail to find its account of a liberal, cosmopolitan culture’s downfall distressingly resonant?

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:12:23 -0400

Ran across this fascinating toy that lets you see the night sky from any point on earth at any time in history.

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 11:23:55 -0400

Hey folks, I need to ask a favor if anyone has a few minutes. I am replacing my SquareSpace woodworking website with a new, hand-built one and would like a few people to test it out for me: look around, see if you run into any problems, and reply here or send me a message through the contact form.

There is no online store as such, only an email-request form. So you might even choose a carving, click “request purchase” and try out that functionality, with a note saying you don’t actually want it and are just testing. I’ll make the same offer here I’m planning to put out on my email list: if you do that, and there’s ever anything you actually do want, I’ll give you a 10% discount (max $20).

Here’s the link to the beta version.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 19:39:01 -0400

Proposition: Video replay should be used, if it is used at all, only to correct on-field, real-time calls that may by objective standards have been incorrect: was the ball fair or foul, was the runner safe or out, was the receiver’s foot in or out of bounds, did the puck cross the line. Video replay should never be used to make or alter subjective judgments. Given enough time and analysis I can prove virtually anything you like, and so can a referee with multiple camera angles and slow-motion.

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:03:37 -0400

Stories of European tourists being pleasantly surprised that we’re not all ogres over here have me thinking of Frances Trollope and remembering that I should be glad Americans don’t spit as much as we used to.

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 22:17:50 -0400

Granted I chose my angles carefully, but the native perennials have managed this well so far without any city water, only what’s fallen from the sky.

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:22:41 -0400

“May Song II.” Four panels in a reclaimed window, 20×25 inches. The text is my somewhat free translation of a portion of Goethe’s poem “Mailied,” and all but one of the flowers depicted are drawn from photos of my front-yard flower meadow (in past years, when it rained).

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:16:22 -0400

Rain barrel installed, after two additional (unforeseen but unsurprising) trips to Lowe’s. Now I expect either the eastern piedmont will turn into a temperate rain forest, or it will never rain again and we’ll all wind up as extras in a film version of Ezekiel 37.

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:08:31 -0400

Two inches of rain in the past week has Crabtree Creek rushing by at a normal height, but the wetland area by Raleigh Road tells the full story. The stumps in the first photo and the cracked earth in the last should be well under water. We have a long way to go before we’re out of this drought.