Barbara Leedom

Walk around the cranberry bogs of Cape Cod – cranberries.org says about 11,500 bogs in southeastern Massachusetts – in mid-winter, and it’s quiet. Desolate. Frigid. Filled with life. Gypsy dog and I set out on a in-the-20s January day for a nearby bog. Gypsy is the size of a fox and is of the same color. Unlike a fox, Gypsy is not sly. She romps around my feet as we trod the bog, ever alert for I know not what. Ears up, tail up, nose down, she smells smells I’ll never know.

When I bought my Cape Cod ranch house in 2004, I didn’t know about all the rocks and stones and pebbles underneath the crabgrass and moss that covered my new backyard. I’d find 550 of them. Yep, 550 rocks found in one spring and summer, as I dug out the grass and moss. I flung great heaps of sandy soil onto what would become a six-foot long horizontal line back by the shed. I hauled rocks – some as big as the computer console I had then, some as small as teakettles.

Amid all the destruction and deaths going on in Ukraine, little attention was given to a bill to give access to abortion nationwide on Feb. 28. It was blocked in the Senate. Under this bill, abortions would be allowed before “fetal viability” and when the health risks to the mother are at risk. The right to abortions is totally political. All Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) voted against the bill in the 50-50 Senate. Forty-six Democrats voted in favor.