Michigan Forest Life - November 30, 2025

Greetings friends,

It is the last day of November. A healthy dose of real winter white has swept across Michigan. Snow has a way of making you feel alive - more alive.

As 2025 brings on its last few weeks, permit me to take a paragraph or two to thank you for your ongoing tolerance and patience with these Michigan Forest Life emails. Most of you know that I write them while at Winterfield Pines Nature Sanctuary using my cell phone. There is neither electricity, nor Wi-Fi, at Winterfield Pines, though most people who come to the property have cell phone signal part of the time.

I know the Michigan Forest Life emails are riddled with spelling problems, often grammatical problems, missed plurals, missing words, extra words, and certainly other typos. This cell phone has mighty small keys, and I have mighty large fingers. That is what I generally attribute the problems to. But there is more – oil lamps at the wee hours of the morning, a phone spell-checker that is not really a spell-checker and is full of past misspellings. And then, of course, the stray undetected autocorrects.

I should add “old eyes” to the list, and perhaps, that I have never been good at spelling. This is where I need to bring up the quote that all entry level engineers know: “Engggineer, yesterday I couldn’t spell it, today I are one.”  (I do keep an old Webster Dictionary in the Treehouse that I refer to frequently … when something doesn’t look quite right. By years, it is literally an antique – as am I. I keep a magnifying glass on top of the dictionary.) Recognizing that something doesn’t look quite right is one problem, and general snow blindness is another. I read each email several times and I read right through the problems. Snow blindness in writing.

So, for those of you who see each problem and cringe for me, thank you for tolerantly reading the Michigan Forest Life emails and being inspired by the photos and message.  I have yet to send an error-free email.  I, too, find most of the problems after I hit the send key and have another look in the morning.  

For those of you who read the emails and see nothing wrong with them, thank you, too, for being a bit like me.

The good news is that, beginning with emails from one year ago, I began cleaning up the Michigan Forest Life emails, imbedding the photos, having them properly proofread, corrected, and posted on my website. Posting typically lags the actual email date by two weeks. Go there if you would like a better reading experience. The easy link that gets you to the website and brings you directly to the blog section is:

DanEllens.com/blog

But when you read the email-email, know that you are getting the authentic, imperfect me. Perhaps there is a charm in that.

Some of you may be surprised to know that today I am not writing from the Treehouse. I am on my way to Vermont to spend one week narrating the Audiobook for FOREST LEGEND: THE TALE OF OL’ SPLIT TOE. I left yesterday by car, just ahead of the winter storm. Today the snow may catch up with me.

Meanwhile, permit me to give you another FOREST LEGEND teaser – snippet 10 of 27 (Photo 1).

I wish you snow in the air – and a place to stay warm.

Until next time,  

Dan

Excerpt from Chapter 12

AD 1880 - During that dry spring, a pioneering family moved in on the 160-acre parcel bordering the south side of the logging road to a point just east of the river. Their property included the peninsula, now aspen-covered. They purchased the land for one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, which was more money than the family had. They settled a portion of the transaction in the form of a loan, which they intended to pay off bit by bit on an annual basis.

At the northeast corner was the surveyor’s stake that Edra—the woman who came to the forest on the supply wagon—had found among the trees several years earlier. Twelve tall white pines formed a kind of property line along the common border of Edra’s property and the parcel belonging to the pioneering family.

Copyright @ 2025 by Daniel S. Ellens

Pre-order now on Amazon

Publication Date: March 31, 2026

Praise for FOREST LEGEND:

“In this wise, deeply moving modern legend, a majestic deer is chosen by the spirits to travel across time while staying in place—his birthplace, one small corner of Michigan—and to witness the ceaseless changes on Earth by glacier, fire, flood, plants and animal, ever more clever and numerous humans, and Mother Nature’s unhurried, even-handed remediation. Spanning time from the end of the Ice Age to the climax of the Industrial Age, Forest Legend, a story for all ages, brings to vivid life the question on which our survival hangs: Can humans ever conquer and replace nature? Should we even try? Can we relearn that we are a part of her, and corral our technological powers within the reverence and respect of our Indigenous ancestors?”

– Annie Gottlieb, author of Do You Believe in Magic?, co-author of Wishcraft and The Cube, critic and commentator in The New York Times, O the Oprah Magazine, VOGUE, and The Nation.