Orb: A young friend's picture

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

Leaf, beetle...beetle poop?

For Macro Monday 7/27/09

Hiking home

For Sunday Scribblings #173 - Where in the World?

Friday morning I drove down the hill and over the state road to the local auto repair shop. My power steering had gone away two days before, making steering around corners an upper-body workout, and only comfortably do-able if I rounded them on two wheels. Some of the roads here are narrow, with deep ditches; the two-wheel cornering was a little treacherous in spots. I showed up at 8:50 for my 9:00 appointment, thinking I would wait, wandering around outdoors taking pictures, and then sail off with my smooth steering restored. I asked TG where he wanted me to wait, and his eyes widened.

"You're gonna wait?"

"That was the plan. If that's not a good idea, I'll make other plans."

"It could be two, three hours before we even get the parts. And then there's puttin' 'em on..."

"Okay," I said. "I'll figure out something."

I went outside, checked my contacts on my cellphone and realized that everyone who might give me a ride home was sixteen miles away, and at work. So I set off to walk home.

I had plenty of time, and it wasn't raining. It was a good day for a long walk with a purpose. When I was a country kid I walked everywhere. I knew every tree root and hanging grapevine on our road. They were landmarks to me: far from home; closer to home; almost home. Walking with the goal of getting somewhere has become a rarity in my life. Sometimes I think of the old days when traveling took as long as it took and people gained hours of thinking time while they journeyed. If people got along better then than they do now, I think that's part of the reason. I thought the mental benefit would justify any physical discomfort I might feel.

It was a pleasure to walk on nice smooth pavement, much easier than tottering through hayfields on wobbly ankles. I happily admired the surrounding hills and stopped to investigate small orange flowers I had never seen. The road sloped downward at a very gentle angle and I was having a good time. Where the road curved, and my walking lawfully facing oncoming traffic might present too great a surprise for drivers, I crossed to the other side.

I heard a distant bang . . . bang . . . bang: Somebody pounding in a stake. A goldfinch dipped past me, a bright ball of sunshine on the wing.

Not a sunny day, but warmer than it had been. I grew a little moist. I took off my shirt, threaded it through the straps of my purse and my camera bag, and continued on in tank top and jeans.

Just at the curve, I stopped to watch and listen to water gushing out of a culvert to continue its flow into a stream bordered and dotted with steppable rocks, overhung with tree branches. I noticed how large the "curve" sign arrow was. It didn't seem that big from inside a car. "This is the beauty of walking," I thought, "Seeing things that I hadn't noticed ever before." After my breathing was a little back to normal I went on, and crossed the road again to accomodate another, opposite, curve.

On my left, thistles in fuzzy purple bloom, and roadside chicory, such a peaceful blue. ("During the Civil War they used chicory in place of coffee.")

I heard brook-babble and was delighted to stop and listen to that, seeing exactly where the water's drop over a particular stone made the sound.

I thought about unpacking the camera, but the deerflies have hatched and continued movement kept them at bay. Still, I carried one on my head.

I could feel him there, tasting the moisture from my scalp. I passed a hound who dutifully ran out from his house barking and meaning to look scary.

I thought if he bit me and I had to stop, that wouldn't be so bad. But I looked at him and kept walking and he retreated to his porch (I think. I didn't look.) satisfied with himself. "There. Scared another one off." I began to notice the squashed plastic cups on the road's shoulder.

There, around the last curve, the foot of my road. Like the Rocky Mountains to westward travelers, it seemed so close. I accommodated a painful callus on my left foot with a small hitch in my stride.

In the cool of the mouth of my dirt home-road, I stopped to enjoy the breeze that blew down the leafy channel from the top of the hill. I eyed the upward slope. I savored the small trickle of the runoff in the ditch. And breathed. Only a mile left and I would be home. I hummed the tune of "One more mountain, One more river, One more mile and I'll be home..." Stopped humming: needed air for other purposes.

One more mile. All at an angle. Upward. On a stony dirt road.

Inspired by my neighbor who frequently walks this road despite the onset of Parkinson's Disease, I began to count steps: I would stop every fifty-second step. If the road was a mile long, ten sets would see me at my driveway with only another seven hundred feet to go.

Stopped at the twenty-eighth step, I hauled air into my lungs. I heard a vehicle coming behind me. I turned to see a beautiful bright blue pickup truck.

A fragment of thought, "Ask for a ride," slithered through my brain. "Too embarrassing. Who can't climb a hill?" and I took another step. I wobbled, one foot crossing the other to keep my balance. I thought the truckdriver might think I was drunk. I continued carefully so that I would not tip over in front of his tires. He passed.

There is a spot on this dirt road where the greenery grows close and the air doesn't move.

Like a jungle.

The deerflies like that spot.

The mosquitos like it too.

I thought about the goodness of being able to sweat, how cooling it is as it evaporates, even where it drips from head to clothing.

A hundred feet more, the flora opened up and air, sweet air, blew over me.

Another hundred feet, and I was at the neighbor's "Quietude" sign. Last summer when I was walking for sport, that was the turnaround place. The slope gentles there, only a thirty-five degree angle.

I knew this part of the road. I knew the landmarks: far from home; closer to home; almost home. I was closer to home. I began again to take pleasure in the surroundings. A chipmunk practiced qajaasaarneq on low-growing plants; thirty feet from me, tiny bunnies browsed in the road, scampered away from me and stopped again to sniff; gray squirrels ran full-bore up tree trunks; I glimpsed one red squirrel. Behind me I heard scuffling small paws as furry bodies darted into thick undergrowth. I recognized groups of leaves that I photographed last fall when they were red and pink rather than these various shades of green. I greeted the hollow tree where fairies surely must live.

Through the leaves I heard the pang of a hickory nut falling hard on my storage shed's metal roof. Almost home.

Fifty feet into the driveway I could hear the dogs barking inside the house; they could hear me coming.

When you live in the country, on a dirt road where you recognize particular leaves and trees, "almost home" is home.

Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Job

The old laptop began dying last Thursday evening when a tablespoon (perhaps two) of water dripped from above onto the keyboard. For years the old Dell recovered from such mishaps. It worked fine after a similar incident with coffee. It held up after I tripped over the power cord and caused its rapid descent to the floor. It was unaffected by Marly's 2003 use of its corner as a doggy chew toy. It's possible that there were too many such mishaps in its long, long life, or more likely, it had reached far beyond its expected span of days.

After Thursday's water event, I worked with the dysfunctional keyboard for a couple of days, living in hope that it would heal itself, learning to substitute m for n and contorting my right hand so as to always use that shift key since the left shift key did No Thing. Unexpected things were happening at increasingly frequent intervals. My concentration was interrupted by random unrequested Google search dialog boxes, sudden firebell alarms from the Dell's bowels, the rapid appearance of thousands of iterations of the current web page, other unsettling events.

By 7:30am on Sunday the boil of my frustration had burst and I had a new laptop out of the box and onto the coffee table. It is sleek and smooth, black and silver and, since I have no need of a gnome-size computer, a nice big screen. It is light in weight: a valuable feature considering that rapid descent to the floor peril.

It and I eagerly anticipated our union.

I put a cd-r into the Dell and selected files to transfer to their new home. The Dell suggested that I insert a cd into the d drive. I popped the cd out and put it back in again. Again, the Dell suggested that I insert a cd into the d drive. I popped the cd out, dusted off everything with a soft brush, and put it back in again. The Dell suggested that I insert a cd into the d drive. I commenced attaching all my files to email messages to myself, for uploading when I had the new laptop online.

Rural dwellers understand that the handy integrated wireless capability is useless in a home located like mine. I have a wireless USB modem, acquired after years of listening to my hair growing while I waited for dial-up. For the modem to work the computer into which is plugged must have the software installed. I could not find the cd-rom for the modem. I called Verizon to ask if I could buy a new cd-rom.

"No, we don't sell them here but if you call customer service, they can tell you how to download it from the internet."

"Oh good! Thank you."

I hung up.

And in a moment realized that my predicament was in no way mitigated.

I set out extra early the following morning, the first day of a new week, for my first visit to the only internet cafe within twenty miles to download the program onto the new laptop. Then I would go on to work to do my new morning job. (Never mind that I've been doing this new job since January; it's still new.) The first meeting of the photography class would be that evening. A new cafe, a new laptop, a new class that evening to learn how to use my new camera. I am not comfortable with new: I know how a wild rabbit feels, frozen with panic in the middle of an interstate.

I reached the cafe just as they were opening the doors, achieved a cup of coffee and established myself and the laptop at a table. I could not find the right web page for the download and had to leave for work before I had accomplished my goal.

The photographer called and postponed the class to Wednesday: A death in his family, necessary travel out of town. I tried to sound sympathetic rather than overflowing with relieved delight at the delay.

I went back to the cafe in the afternoon with a surreptitiously-acquired-during-working-hours printout of instructions. I attained the proper web page, entered the Verizon modem's telephone number from memory, and began the download. I could feel the tension leaving my shoulders as I sighed with relief and sipped my coffee. I waited, watching the lime green worm grow by millimeters across the screen. The download seemed to be taking a long time. I watched the laptop's battery percentage, and twitched with anxiety that the former would outlast the latter.

Finally, "Installation complete."

I packed up and trundled out to my car.

I checked the telephone number that I'd entered.

I had entered one digit wrong: an eight instead of a three.

I considered and rejected the thought of returning to the cafe for a do-over: the battery wouldn't last long enough.

"All right," I thought, resigned. "Tonight, recharging. Tomorrow, a do-over."

Home at last, I had nothing to lose. I plugged in my tiny modem. VZ Access Manager appeared, and offered connection. God bless Verizon's little heart, it forgave my one-digit error and allowed me online.

I'm waiting on moving all the files to their new home. I need a little Life-As-Usual for a while.

It shall be: My camera and I, friends

Beginning on Monday evening, ten weeks of one-night-a-week classes with a local photographer. I am delighted.

Natural life

Always near the top of my Gratitude List is that I live where there is more nature than humanity.

One morning as my eyes opened I saw, on the stonewall at the far edge of the field a brown thing: a very big woodchuck. I know where along that wall his burrow door is, but I rarely see him. That morning he hopped from stone to stone and finally stood up to survey the field. He's a big successful woodchuck; his height seemed to be thirty inches or more.

Every weekday's first half-mile of my commute grants me my own view of wild animals living their natural lives.

A couple of weeks ago I surprised a whitetail mama and her just-old-enough-to-be-dry fawn. Not much more than two feet tall, the baby was a small square shape, not even old enough to have begun to get leggy. Good genes: The baby took off into the woods before mama did. More likely, Mom said, "Run!" and chose to stay for defensive action if necessary. I stopped the car and waited, and shortly after he was safely out of sight, she followed him.

More recently, a partridge stood in the ditch and calmly watched me pass.

This week's sightings have been great, and it's only Wednesday.

On Monday:

Two cottontails in the driveway (I stopped to wait until they felt that prudence dictated dispersal).

Two cottontails, crouched communing face to face in the middle of the road. (I stopped to wait until they finished their conversation.)

A brood of turkey chicks peep-peep-peeping single-file across the road. As they disappeared into the greenery, I stopped to listen to the hidden hen calling to them, a low cluck . . . cluck . . . cluck.

Two deer, then a little farther on, two more.

On Tuesday:

Two cottontails, again crouched communing face to face in the middle of the road. ("Oh no, here she comes again. TTYL.")

One very fast red squirrel, tiny and much more sparsely-furred than his gray cousins.

One deer mid-grand jete across the road.

Two chipmunks. Some days it's The Great Chipmunk Migration and the road is busy with 'munks on their way to anywhere else.

Five more deer scattering into the woods on either side of the road as I rounded the curve.

For me seeing these furred and feathered creatures is like watching the ocean or the sky: It provides me with some helpful perspective.

Life goes on.

Despite my human worries, Life is going on just fine.

"Textures" for Sunday Stills

"Textures" for Sunday Stills

This was a lot more fun than I thought it would be.

(Click on the pictures to enlarge them and really see the textures.)
I'll be checking out others' links at Sunday Stills!

My world and why I cannot show it to you

One of my fiercest and most abiding faults is impatience.
I am not slow and steady in my approach to learning. Anything.

I am frustrated with my new camera.
Rather, I am frustrated with myself: The camera is smarter than I am.
Husband says the camera store staff gives classes. At first I dismissed the idea, thinking that I would feel out the whole process by trial and error. I now discern that with the number of options on that little dial and the up-and-down and left-and-right adjustments and my capacity for endless error, not to mention not being able to keep track of what mode on the little dial I have tried and what I did with it, that I need Help.

It would be a shame not to learn how to use this camera in all its facets. I'm missing out on a lot by not knowing what it all means. Reading the manual is an exercise in confusion: it assumes a level of knowledge that I don't have. I am fortunate to have a photography expert acquaintance. He has a talent for communicating what he knows but even he, with his rare ability to dumb down his knowledge into words that I can understand, increases the size of the photography universe about which I am learning how little I know. If ignorance is bliss, learning how little I know is the opposite.

This is what I want to do:
I want to take pictures at night . . . of the moon . . . of my night patio with the solar lights glowing through the leaves of my plants, hinting at fairies cavorting among the foliage.


I want to take pictures that show the satin velvet of the petals of flowers.
I want to take pictures of birds without losing them when they take wing out of the tiny area I've zoomed in on.


I see beautiful things all day long. Colors, animals with bright eyes and ticked fur. Dragonflies with wide black and silver bars on their blown-glass wings. A particular shade of golden green that is a beam of sunlight glowing through leaves. The neon colors of tiny insects glowing emerald green and metallic steel blue. I want to get those things!

I want what I want and I want it now.
I want to be Ansel Adams. This afternoon.
But my photography mentor told me Adams was never satisfied with photos until he'd done all kinds of things to them in the lab. It seems illegitimate to me to fix things up with lab techniques, or with "autocorrect" on the computer.

At tantrum times like this I fall back on my easiest road to creativity: to see and see and see; and reproduce my vision in language. I don't mind writing the thousand words needed to replace a picture. But a written piece is my own impression.
A picture is like music, a different story to each viewer. A photograph can go straight to the heart.

Two Summer Beauties

Gee, I love summer.

Mama had two fawns stashed nearby while she grazed near the garage.
She could hear the whir of the camera but never thought to look up to see me
lurking on the second floor of the house.

Mr. Toad never moved while I shifted patio pots all around him.

Sunday Stills - Wildflowers -- a late entry

I found these at the base of the maple tree in the front yard. They look a little bit like some kind of clover, with puffy balloon-like petals.

I'd never seen them before.
Wandering around with a camera, I see things that hitherto never existed in my world.

I'm so happy that I got the picture righter than I might have (reading the manual, fiddling around, reading, fiddling) that I'm tacking it onto Sunday Stills for this week.

Coming back to add . . . I wonder if anybody noticed the Angus poodle-nose on the right.

Sunday Stills - Wildflowers

I fear I've gone a little overboard with this Sunday Stills challenge. New camera, dontchaknow...I need to sit down and thoroughly read the owner's manual....

Good ol' daisies

The thing I love most about wildflowers is the profusion of gentle color.

Here are three reasons I really need to understand my settings better....

1.

2.

3.

Wild parsnip, like gigantic Queen Anne's lace...

The little orange moth at the left was a bonus.

Daisy fleabane...I think.

Sting

This week's Weekend Wordsmith suggests Sting as a topic.

Long long ago and thirty miles to the east I had finished mowing the back yard and had happily settled, with my book, my cigarettes and a beverage, in a chaise longue in the shade of the crabapple tree to enjoy the feeling of my sweat drying while I read. The crabapple was in bloom, so I did not remark upon the presence of the occasional bee humming by. After several minutes, it seemed that there was, in fact, a remarkable number of bees in the area.

I stopped reading and watched the bees. And saw that they were entering and exiting a very small hole in the ground a foot to the right of my seat. Fascinating. Quite a crowd, coming and going through an aperture no larger in circumference than, say, my cigarette.

I decided to undertake a scientific experiment. What would the result be if a blockage of the bee doorway were to occur? I looked at my cigarette butt, burned nearly to the filter. I looked at the beehole.

I placed the cigarette butt into the beehole. It slid into place perfectly, and completely obstructed the bees' passage, which circumstance seemed to confuse the insects. A traffic jam of stymied bees milled on their tiny feet in circles around their former doorway. Incoming bees, apparently seeing the multitude around the landing strip, began to circle, waiting for air traffic control to signal them in.

I felt sorry that I'd caused such consternation for the creatures and thought now that I'd seen the result of my experiment I would remove the cigarette butt. As the thought entered my mind, I realized that the bees were beginning to mutter and hum more and more loudly. They sounded like the background crowd noise in an old movie: Cauliflower, rutabaga, cauliflower, rutabaga, cauliflower, rutabaga. Each passing second increased the volume of their discontent's expression.

The correction of what I now saw to be an error in judgment became something of a conundrum for me: Should I reach down and pluck the errant butt out of the beehole or should I exit the site, leaving the butt in the hole?
I wanted to show the bees that I had meant no harm; it seemed only right that I should undo my offense. I reached down and pincered the butt between thumb and index finger.

Uh oh.

Now the bees knew from whence the blockage had come. Maybe they didn't know. Maybe they just didn't care.
They saw the butt. They saw the butt in my fingers. They saw my fingers interloping into their ruined dooryard.

Some of these tales that I tell, I share simply on the off chance that I might educate others so they might not do some stupid stuff that I have done.

Cheeks

It's been a long time since I indulged in Inspire Me Thursday, whose prompt for this week is Cheeks.

No essay or story here; just impressions.

My mother's cheek, scented with Max Factor face powder, on my seven-year-old Sunday mornings.
My animals' cheeks, the perfect spot for sound kisses.
My question to a cosmetician friend: "What's a moonface?" Her answer, accompanied by a circular hand motion in the area of her face: "A lot of cheek."
Piers Morgan's reference to Susan Boyle's "cheeky smile."
My sixteen year old purplish acne-scarred cheeks. Thank the Lord those scars faded!
The apples of my cheeks where I am, at this Certain Age, advised to apply blush.

I had hoped for more here, but that's about it.
I need, now, to move my butt cheeks in the direction of morning errands.

MiMau and the Importance of Keeping the Upper Paw

The challenge for Sunday Stills this week is "wildflowers." As soon as I got home yesterday, the dogs, MiMau and I walked up the driveway and out and down our one-lane dirt road. The dogs sniffed and trotted, the cat meandered along behind, and I took a hundred wildflower pictures, trying different settings.

About halfway through our walk, a car came from behind us . . . stopped far up the road in order to let us get ourselves sorted out. I picked up Max and Angus, one in each arm, and trusted MiMau to have enough sense to run off the side of the road on her own. She knew the car was there and if I had had a third arm I would have picked her up too. All things considered, it is as well that I did not have and do.

Max and Angus started to quibble with each other across my chest. I held them tighter, wishing the driver of the car would hurry up and get on by. MiMau sensed the growing tension and reacted by going into attack mode and put some impressive clawmarks into both sides of my left calf. The car went by, the driver politely thanked me. I put the dogs down and let them fend off the cat. I limped on, the blood wet and cool on the leg of my jeans, and they worked off their group steam. Sometimes the less involved I am in their squabbles, the better off we all are. (Tell me again: Why is managing pets different from managing children?) By the time we'd gone on a hundred feet, everybody was back to abnormal.

In MiMau's ten years here, she has trained four dogs: The two poodles; foundling dog Chase; rescued dog Marly.
Her early method was hiding behind the sliding door of a closet and reaching out a paw full of claws, followed by random rushes. By the time Marly arrived, she had honed her skills to The Eye:
"This porch is mine. You may come No Closer."
"This nice dogbed of yours? Now it is mine."

Tonight we have a four month old German shepherd as a house guest. His owner is away and his owner's wife feels that the dog doesn't like her, so the little guy's having an overnight away from home.

MiMau spent today outdoors in the rain. She was tufted with wet when I arrived home, and greeted me loudly and appreciatively. She might have sworn at me (I didn't quite hear), but I think she was mostly happy that I am tall enough to reach the handle that opens the door to Dry and Warm. It had not been A Good Day For The Cat.
The arrival of House Guest Pup did not improve her Tuesday.

I was not on the scene for the meeting. Husband tells me that she used some very rude language to our guest before departing the environs in disgust.
An hour later, she stalked into the room, past the pup.
She assumed a vantage point beneath a table two feet from the pup. She could see him; he could not see her.
He could feel the force of The Eye: something wicked this way comes.
He licked his lips.
MiMau craned her neck out from her hiding spot, her body stretched behind in taut interest.
To Husband I said, "You know what she's thinking."
"She's thinking," he said, "that she's going to establish her dominance right away."
"Right," I said. "She's working up to Ninja Cat."
He took the dog into the tv room and closed the door.

She really is a nice little cat. She and Angus, in particular, have a close relationship and they regularly groom each other and settle into sleep together.
She is, however, the smallest member of the animal family, and she knows she has few options in the face of larger unknown quantities. It is best to let those quantities know, at the earliest opportunity, that hidden behind her soft and fluffy exterior she is All Teeth And Claws.

1965: Riding the bus

When I was in my teens, the city/village bus was the way we got to the city to shop at the three-story department stores on Pearl Street, to see movies at the grand old Palace Theater or at the smaller, less rococo second-choice Strand, and to anyplace in between the village and the city. There wasn't much in the fifteen miles between, really, except my high school and some of my friends' homes. At the city end, I wasn't aware of anything beyond the capitol building at the top of State Street. To me, it was as if the whole city was one block wide, and stretched from the
D & H Plaza to the capitol. Beyond was The Uncivilized West.

As late as the mid-1960s, a trip to the city required fixed hair, stockings, a skirt. I'd get dressed up and walk from home across the village to the local post office/bus stop and stand waiting for the stinking behemoth to lumber its swaying rounded gray and white bulk around the far corner. It would pass out of sight but not out of hearing, droning down Chatham Street and rounding the corner to Malden, and I would nervously check and recheck that I had my two quarters (one for going and one for getting back) to give the driver for my passage. It was an exhilarating innovation when coin machines were installed and a person could just board and drop the fare into the machine. I felt thrillingly anonymous to be able to step up, drop my quarter and dime (the fare had gone up to thirty-five cents by then, probably to pay for those machines), and walk down the aisle of dirty old green and white seats to choose a spot on the starboard side.

Two "bus" memories come to my mind:

One is of a fat woman with long greasy hair who always sat alone on the long back seat. She rode from the city to the town's lake, where there were camps that had evolved into small ramshackle year-round homes. At irregular intervals throughout her ride, she would erupt with sudden, loud noises: "HUP!," "HUP!HUP!HUP!"
Every HUP! made me twitch with fright. I thought she was insane: Maybe she was urging the bus onward, faster, as if she were driving a horse and wagon.
I had never heard of Tourette's Syndrome; who had?

The other is the summer that I took tennis lessons at the high school, and rode the bus there and back every day.
I fell in deep and silent love with John, the bus driver. I had checked old high school yearbooks and I knew his last name. I had determined that he was six years my senior. Sixteen/twenty-two: not an impossible span for romance.
I would try to look fit and Bobbie Brooks-perky/nonchalant while John and his bus approached.

For the return trip, it was good if it was a hot day and I was sweaty, as if I had played hard, when he picked me up. After a couple of weeks, we had just about reached the initial stages of conversation . . .

He: "What are you, some kind of a tennis nut?"
I: "I love it!" (I could barely keep up a volley.)

. . . when the day came that the bus stopped, the doors opened,
I looked up at him with a flirtatious smile...
...and tripped and fell sprawling up the steps.
I think I never took another tennis lesson.

I mentioned that old bus in an email to my friend, and she recalled The Burning of W's Birthday Pillow Incident, as follows.

"I had wrenched $35 from my penurious fists to buy a large floor pillow; a generous and sophisticated gift, I mused. In a fairly crowded city/country bus, I carefully set my cumbersome trophy in its classy store bag on the floor by my feet (on the wall side - nobody was going to grab this from me!).
Gradually, my neighboring passengers and I became aware of the vaguely smoky smell. Then of the vaguely smoky air. Then of the fact that I had sat my package on a smoldering cigarette butt, and now had a smoldering wad of stuffing. The driver pulled to the side of the road, walked back to me with a look of disgust and boredom, picked up the pillow, walked to the open door, and threw it out. Pulled the bus back into traffic, and life went on."

Oh, the drama.

What a lovely day!

Oh, look! It's another foggy morning!
I can barely see the trees at the edge of the field, eight hundred feet away.
Glorious!

What's better than a full day of rain, after the last three weeks of days full of raindrops?
I can look forward to a high temperature of 72 degrees on this 20th day of June!

I have learned this spring that basil plants get woody when they get too much water.
I have learned that geranium blossoms that have been rained on for days look just like wet hair straight out of the shower. I break off the drowned things to help the plants decide to generate more flowers, but they aren't having it. My plants need umbrella hats.


The upside is that there's not a lot of that pesky deadheading to do.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
I am inundated with silver linings.

Ice cream

One day when I was eleven I had the very firm and distinct thought that when I was grown up I would eat all the ice cream I wanted, anytime I wanted to. For the last several weeks I have been doing that.

It is such a comfort, ice cream. Real ice cream, softened around the edges of the carton, studded with caramel or butter brickle, or nuts of some description. My preference is to eat it as it is almost turning from anything resembling a solid to a puddle of sweetened cream.

I like oatmeal. I particularly like oatmeal with raisins, brown sugar, cinnamon . . . and ice cream. Oatmeal a la mode. It's still oatmeal with all the good stuff for which oatmeal is famous, so it must be good for me. Right?

For pure hedonistic decadence I like dark chocolate cake with Hershey's cocoa frosting, with Death By Chocolate ice cream and Mrs. Richardson's hot fudge piled on top. The cake and the fudge should be warm so as to melt the ice cream and turn the whole concoction into a mush of chocolate, with the cake providing the slightest soupcon of texture.

I might one day notice or care about the inevitable result of my self-indulgence. The likelihood of that diminishes as time goes by: I am old. There's a limit to my ability to defy the Ugly Curve's trajectory:
I might as well enjoy the slide.

For now, I am adhering to my childhood determination.
I need to go now: there's some Adirondack Bear Paw calling my name.
I can hear it banging on the freezer door.
Best go let it out.

A new day

I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day,
a fresh try, one more start,
with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.
~J.B.Priestley (1894-1984)

Good humor, good will

When I was young I was very serious. One of the gifts of aging is that I have grown so much more comfortable with my own humor.

I like laughter. I am known for my indulgence in gigglefests. Last year the people in another office could set their watches by my 2:30pm laughter echoing down the hall.

A few years ago I was note taker for a series of meetings that always went on for far too long. Always at 9:15pm some little thing would strike me as hysterically funny, and the members of the group knew that it was time to adjourn.

Last week there was another one of those long and frustrating meetings at which I recorded every word. Immediately after adjournment I melted down into a gigglefest. I took off my glasses to wipe tears from my eyes. Somehow during my hysteria I slapped my hand on the table and mashed my glasses. I got them straightened out yesterday, a little screw replaced. They had been wearable, but cockeyed on my face: It could rightly be said that I had had a screw loose.

I like banter. A little injection of personality can go a long way in making life pleasant.

Peter is a contractor. Every project application he brings us is well prepared and presented in the proper number of copies. He is articulate and witty and smart, and he makes my work life easier. A couple of weeks ago a client of his called me. “Peter suggested I call June ‘because June knows everything.’”
Dryly, I responded, “Mmm-hm. And just how well do you know Peter?”
We chuckled together, and I told him what he needed and emailed him some additional information.

Mike is a carpenter, a true craftsman. He recently bought two buildings that badly need his skills. He came in last week for an application to start renovating one of them. It was while I was doing my Morning Job, where I don’t handle those things. I invited him to come with me and I’d get the paperwork he needed. “I don’t have to wait until this afternoon?” he asked. I got up from my chair, grabbed my keys. “Well, you would . . . except I want more coffee, and the coffee’s in that office.”

A man called last week to find out what amount of tax he owed. I gave him the figure and as soon as I hung up, realized I’d given him the wrong information. I called him back and he said his wife was “looking through the papers on the counter here…”
“What would we all do without kitchen counters?” I asked him, and we laughed wryly.
I gave him the right information, he repeated it, and I could hear his wife saying in the background, “That’s right.”
“She says that’s right. She’s got the paper here,” he said.
"See? She’s on top of it!” I said, and we laughed together again.

An old woman called to get a new handicapped parking permit. I told her she’d need an application from her doctor. “Oh?” she asked, “It’s been so long since I got the first one, I can’t remember how it goes.”
I got an application form and told her its title and the form number to ask for at her doctor’s office. She repeated all of it, and I said, “Are you sure you need one of these? You don’t sound handicapped to me!”
Her aide, listening on an extension, piped up, “If her legs worked as well as her mouth, she wouldn’t!” We all laughed.
The old woman asked me, “What was your name again?”

Last Friday afternoon a woman phoned me to ask me who she should contact about a problem. She knew, she said, that it wasn’t something that involved me, “but you’re always so helpful.” I thanked her and told her how to reach the person who might be able to provide a solution. I told her it might be somebody else but it would be good to let the first man know what had happened, and he would be the place to start.

She told me my ears must have been ringing the day before. She had been in a group of people who were all talking about their good experiences with me.
“You don’t know how grateful I am to you for telling me that. It’s been a tough year,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I just wanted you to know that you have a fan club out there.”

I shop in a local supermarket where the music is always from My Era. I sing along and do little dance steps to Chicago’s Make Me Smile or Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl as I shop.
A local shop sells a little slate plaque with imprinted: “You know you’re getting old when the music in the supermarket sounds good.”

When I was checking out I told the cashier both of those things and she recalled that in her youth her father had remarked about her choice of music, “That isn’t music!” and years later she had said the very same thing to her son.

Something happened during our transaction that required the store manager. He did whatever he needed to do and, teasing, said he was glad it was the computer and not the cashier, because he’d have had to fire her. I exclaimed, “You can’t fire her! She’s too valuable!” A quick look of surprise like a passing sunbeam crossed the cashier’s face. “Thank you!” she said.

It’s good to pass along this stuff.
It costs nothing, and is such a gift to a fellow human.

Protest

For Weekend Wordsmith: Protest

Way back in the last century when I was in college, I went on one war protest march. My roommate’s boyfriend drove her, me and a few other people to another campus eleven miles away to join a few hundred others. We walked five miles through the tiny village’s night, singing

“We shall overcome, we shall overcome, we shall overcome one daaaaaaayyyyy…Deep in my heaaarrrt . . . I do belieeeve . . . that we shall overcome sommmme dayyyy,”

and

“All we are saaayyying . . . is give peace a chance….”

We tried to sound mournful and patient and wise, as if we had suffered.

Village residents gathered along the street as if to watch a parade. I remember seeing a woman happily smiling as she watched us go by and not being sure how I felt about that: I thought she should either be joining us or be scowling in condemnation, but her happy smile made me feel a little foolish. It seemed to be the same smile that the grownups had smiled at me during the kindergarten Christmas program.

Students all over the country were protesting, some in far more vigorous ways and in far more violent circumstances. And there we were in a little North Country college town, doing our bit to end the Vietnam War.

I feel a little embarrassed now about that phase of my life. Hippie was a persona I tried on for a little while.

I had the worn, holey bellbottoms and a flag belt buckle but I never did get comfortable with the headband thing. My hair was too slippery, and I didn’t have the right face for the whole costume.

I might have been too clean.

And I hadn’t taken drugs: that sort of cut me out of the inner circle.

Later that night, one of the other girls in my dorm came to my room, breathless: “They’re saying the revolution started tonight!”

Oh man...

This might be the maunderings of an old woman, but greater than the silliness I feel when I think of that phase of my life is the disappointment that I feel about what appears to be the lack of interest on the part of young people in 2009. The drug use seems to have remained, but there’s no verve, no righteous outrage, no Group Think. Where’s the idealism that moved us in 1970? Maybe we Boomers were such a big age group that we had more of an identity as a political force. Maybe there have evolved better, more effective ways to protest? . . . although I don’t see any protest going on among young people, who certainly have reasons to protest something.

Everybody’s watching American Idol and America’s Got Talent and spending gazillions of dollars on electronic entertainment equipment. What happened?

Wonder question: CASE farm equipment

These things have been sitting in the field for years. Husband decided he'd haul them out of the weeds and into the driveway so I could take pictures of them for listing on craigslist.

He hasn't done that.
They continue to live in the driveway for . . . oh, goin' on two weeks now.

One of them is a "three-bottom plow," and the other is . . . something else . . . some kind of cultivator?

I'm trying to figure out how to make good flower boxes out of them.

Sunday Stills - Silhouette

Hungry hummingbirds...

Sun falling into a dead tree...

Take a look at the other beautiful Sunday Stills Silhouettes!

Noticing

Photo by John Yuill

About once every year I am graced with the sight of a scarlet tanager. Four days ago I saw a male in the full regalia of his breeding plumage.

I recognized him only as he vanished into the roadside brush, so that I had to examine my memory to see him. I can see him still, his body brighter than living blood, opaque black wings on the backsweep.

A dozen years ago I worked with Bill, an attorney whose office was lined with his photographs of animals he had seen on his worldwide travels. I asked him about the photo of a soulful-eyed mountain gorilla. He had gone on a Rwanda trek, had seen the gorillas. Bill took some pictures and as the guide led them onward, a young male gorilla rushed out of the leaves and brushed his knuckles against the back of Bill’s hand.

“Barely a touch,” Bill said. “It was his handshake. He was greeting me. It happens . . . so fast . . . that you have only the tactile memory.”

A few years ago in this season, I turned into my driveway and caught a glimpse of pink where there had been fresh green the day before.

I drove down to the house, parked, walked back, Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers in hand, to compare leaves and blossoms to photographs in the book. I judge it to be a mountain laurel.

Every year I forget that gentle surprise, until the next May when one day I enter the driveway and there it is again. Never one or two blossoms: the whole thing is green one day and the next covered with delicate pale flowers. As with most wild shrubs, the flowers won’t last long before the plant withdraws once again into green anonymity; that’s part of the blessing.

So many natural events are visible for just a moment. My photograph is not a good one; I took it through the rain, through the open window of the car. But it will recall to me one ephemeral vision of spring.

I don’t know what this is about.
Is it about the joy of a momentary contact with a wild creature through whatever sensory means, or about the wonder of the memory of such moments? Is it about the useful tool of photography to recall a memory?

Annie Dillard wrote the way you live your days is the way you live your life.

“If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.”

~An American Childhood

Even the best needles are not sharp at both ends. ~Chinese Proverb

I agonized for years over the imperfections in my personality.
I remember telling a junior high school guidance counselor,
“I want to be perfect!” Well into adulthood, fear of imperfection crippled me and I was so happy when I accepted that nothing is perfect.

I work in the same building for the same employer all day. Since January I have had two jobs and two bosses: a Morning Job/Boss and an Afternoon Job/Boss. In the Morning Job every week and every month has scheduled dates for specific step-by-step tasks that must be finished within specific periods of time, and it is all about perfect ending balances.

I am awed by Morning Boss’s skill and knowledge and her patience with her work. Like M*A*S*H’s Major Charles Emerson Winchester III, M.D., she does one thing at a time, she does it very well, and then moves on.
Morning Boss keeps perfect records.
Perfect.
Not a pencil mark or a speck of eraser lint on any of the perfectly hole-punched and bound records that, in compliance with state law, will
be archived for fifty-five years.

A few weeks ago, I prepared and checked some of that paperwork, making tiny pencil checkmarks next to the figures. When I was ready to put it away in its fifty-five-year binder, Boss asked if I wasn’t going to reprint it. “It’s going to be around for fifty-five years: You might want it to look pretty!” In response, I thought (and did not say), “Why? Nobody’s going to look at it ever again.” I've been around for more than fifty-five years and "pretty" doesn't matter so much to me anymore. But I reprinted it before I filed it because Pristine and Perfect is the rule in the Morning Job.

I am not a number cruncher: If I’m $4,000 off, and I find $3999.93 of it, that makes me happy. The first time I said “Yippee!” Morning Boss sent me a shocked and astonished glare. There was not a second "Yippee!" Also [literally] frowned upon: Talking; humming; too-noisy tapping of fingers on keypads; leaving seven cents unfound. At noon, when my four hours at the Morning Job are over, I leave with a huge sigh (silent, sighing also being a frownable offense) of relief, feeling as if I have spent the morning failing.

The nature of the Afternoon Job is different and there could be no two people with more different work styles than my Morning Boss and my Afternoon Boss.

The Afternoon Job is all about laws and schedules, but it’s also all about people. I never know when or what number of people might come through the door, or what issues will arise, or how they’ll develop. Every application, every applicant, every project is different. So in the afternoons, I work differently. When it’s busy I work faster on more things. When it’s slow I fill in the blanks that got missed while I was serving the person in front of me. There is no slow and steady in the Afternoon Job.

In the afternoons I usually work on five or six things simultaneously. Preparing a Certificate of Occupancy, I return a phone call to someone about the zoning of a parcel. While I’m on that call, I’ll reach over to my fax/copier and make photocopies of an application for distribution to board members for a meeting. With one ear I listen to my boss talking to someone at his desk and I call over the name or the telephone number that he can't bring to mind.

If a taxpayer comes to my desk I shove everything to one side and chat with him about his building project or his complaint about his landlord or his neighbor. At any given point, I would be hard-pressed to stop and say exactly where I am with all of the tasks I’m working on, but I know I’m progressing.

We laugh a lot.
We joke.
I break into song.

A few days ago, I got a call at my Morning desk about an Afternoon Job issue. A woman wants to open a new business and I asked her some questions about her plans. After I hung up, Morning Boss said, “You’re so supportive! What enthusiasm!” Unknown to Morning Boss and to the applicant, what I was doing was determining, via interested conversation, if the business suited the zoning in the area where the woman wants to locate. It’s easier for people to talk to me about their plans than it would be for them to answer questions on a checklist.

At the end of the afternoon I always have a million threads to tie up. The tying-up is a signal to my brain that I have accomplished a great deal with great enthusiasm. I leave my desk happy, drained and satisfied.

Even the best needles are not sharp at both ends.

My heart rises with the sun.

Observations of a casual birdwatcher

I have turned all of our trees into orange trees for the benefit of the Baltimore orioles, beautiful and the exact color of the oranges they eat, with the sharp contrast of glossy black back, wings and head. Acrobatic, they don't mind perching practically on their heads so long as it gets them in position to nosh on orange slices.

By accident my orange sections attracted a red bellied woodpecker who arrives with several dry little coughs, and whose kookaburra-like sound I didn’t know until I saw him produce it just before he flew off. He doesn't know he's eating oranges from Hannaford supermarket; according to my Audubon book, he thinks he's eating wild fruits.

I hope he doesn't have a taste for plums, pears, and cherries, now that I've habituated him to finding food in those trees.

The hummingbirds delight me, tiny territorial warriors that they are. During any watching session there is always one who takes control of a feeder, flying off a short distance to lurk in the birch tree and swooping in to chase away any others who chance by. (Read others' interpretations of "Warrior" at Inspire Me Thursday.)

Often a male will perch on the shepherd’s crook that holds a feeder, skyward-angled head abruptly turning right and left on the watch for competitors, a miniscule FDR with cigarette holder.

The swallows have returned to their sturdy, but to my eye, inartistic nest in the woodshed. Last night the pair entertained me for an hour with their balletic moves. I went indoors for a few minutes. When I returned MiMau sprawled triumphantly next to something that looked horrifyingly similar to a felled swallow, with one bird menacing her by deeply plunging dives. I wanted to go see, but didn’t want to know.

I sat and looked for ten minutes from my chair forty feet from the scene, and finally had to go find out if there had been a killing. It was not a dead swallow, but a piece of bark. Jubilation.

Not so jubilant a story…

When I originally opened the bluebird box I thought it was already abandoned, and started to pull out the nesting material before I saw the eggs. After reading about Northview Diary’s baby robin, my envy inspired me to recheck the bluebird box, hoping to find that the four blue eggs would have become four tiny widely-gaping mouths.

The nest remains and there is evidence that efforts were made to reinforce it against predation: the front part has been built up into a sort of wall.

Two eggs remain.

But I believe it has been abandoned because of my intrusion. I feel terrible about that, and won’t be nosing around in future bluebird nesting sites.