Opinion: Remembering Annie Dillard, nature writer

Annie Dillard, who died this week at the age of 81, was often called a nature writer. And she wrote about weasels, squirrels, muskrats and snails, cedar trees and sycamores, mourning doves, moths, and, notably, a giant water bug that bites a small frog and…well, no need to go into that now.

But it was the nature - the mystery - of life that engaged her.

Annie Dillard became the youngest woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, at the age of 28, for her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek . She began the book remembering her old tomcat, who would jump through the bedroom window after prowling outside her home in rural Virginia.

"And some mornings," she wrote, "I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.