Snowmelt Timberdoodles

About the Book

Memory is the electric skeleton for the visual life.

Here are trips into marshes and swamps, forests and stream valleys and the associations triggered from such simple experiences. Whether we go to forget or to remember, these are the traces of one walker's year among insects and birds, through the seasons in the Mississippi and Arkansas River Valleys. Neither biography nor diary, it is at times personal narrative and at times just the moment conveyed as purely as possible. We are sometimes only what we have seen and who we recall in the seeing. It is the joy of going, even for an hour. This is the come-back-and-tell-it part. Among dogs, armadillos, songbirds and children, sometimes it is best just to be humble and stay out of the way. Sometimes you laugh and write it down.

About the Author

Herschel Raney is a practicing physician and amateur naturalist in north central Arkansas. He divides his time with extreme inequality between the woods and the office. Bounced around the globe by prior obligations he now lives and writes in Conway, Arkansas with his wife, his daughter and more dogs and cats than he is willing to admit to.