“In childhood the wilds seemed infinite. Along Crooked Creek in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania there was a tract of forest we called the Big Woods. The hemlock, beech, poplar, red oak, white oak, maple, and shagbark hickory grew on slopes so steep they had never been logged… Now I would not care to visit those faraway scenes. The forest which seemed so vast to us was only a small thing after all, as the bulldozers, earth movers, and dragline shovels have proved.” 

                   — excerpt, “Shadows from the Big Woods,” by Edward Abbey

INDIANA — The author and environmentalist Edward Abbey, a native of Home, wrote these lines in 1974. They have a particular resonance now, during the latest dispute between the five-member White Township board of supervisors and a growing number of Indiana residents over the township’s plan to remove trees from White’s Woods Nature Center.

As spring slowly comes to Indiana, PA, a battle is reheating over the fate of White’s Woods Nature Center, the 250-acre wooded tract of land owned by White Township.

Amid the jocks, nerds and shoulder pads of the ’80s teen rom-com landscape, a dark horse emerged: 1985’s “Just One of the Guys,” which wore its feminist agenda lightly.

I’m a true introvert; over the past six years as a home-based writer, I have missed my old office routine zero times. Still, my adjustment to life in a pandemic has been bumpy and anxiety-inducing for reasons that contradict the social media chatter and internet memes suggesting our lockdown is a forced conversion to an introvert’s way of life.