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Preface
Roosevelt Around Us
In my part of the country, the great Middle West, where a young, greenhorn Teddy Roosevelt first cut his teeth on frontier life, most of us have a Teddy near enough in the family tree—a standard-bearing, exuberant patriarch or matriarch whose enthusiasm for woods and wilds, for creatures great and small, edifies and enlightens.
In my family that figure proved to be my grandmother, Julia, whose naturalist's accoutrements—rock pick, binoculars (“wolf-lookers” as she comically called them), and field guides—I now safekeep at my farm home. Julia—Gran to us—introduced generations (kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, along with countless in-laws, hangers-on, orphans literal and figurative) to the wonders of the many dozens of acres of 150-year-old family timber that were her domain and the object of her benevolent overwatch. Grabbing a passel of us by our kid-hands, she'd launch into forest green for hunts and haunts of an entirely different sort—questing for morel mushrooms or arrowheads or that perfect, milky vein of quartz. At the time of Gran's death, my mother recollected my grandmother as the only one who ever taught her to revere nature—she