whereIwonder&why

It is ending October. One more day after this one. I note the date for reasons of my own that have nothing to do with All Hallows’ Eve festivities. On Wednesday morning, when I wake up, it will be November 1st. This becomes a new morning. Have you ever heard Bob Dylan’s song, New Morning? It has leapt into my head with typing these words. It’s actually the title track on his album of that name, which came out (I looked it up), funnily, in October 1970. I remember buying it new, vinyl, hot off the press. I still have it, but no longer the mechanical means to listen to it, the vinyl album. A shame. But a choice. For neither have I the receiver to capture the tones from the record on the turntable, nor the audio speakers wired to the receiver to enable Dylan’s then young, comprehensible voice to fill the room I am in. I do have, in my head, him singing it, and I am enjoying it.

Can’t you hear that rooster crowing? / … So happy just to see you smiling/Underneath the sky of blue/On this new morning, new morning/On this new morning with you.

Speaking of words. I was thinking about words today, and writing. This time it is because of the novel I happen to be reading. It is a novel of beautiful, beautiful turns of phrases, and choices of words to describe action, to describe environs, and words to insert history that feeds/backstory’s the events of this particular novel’s story and main protagonist. It was, for the first 1/4 to 1/3 a novel that in this beauty and story pulled me along breath-held at how palpable and personal it was. I am now about halfway through. I am pausing. I am looking for something to do–Oh, I know, I say to myself, write a blogpost! The novel has lost my being and holds now only my eyes, as they skim the words, hoping for an insight into the protagonist and into her story that will grab them again and hold them steady, slow, in awe as it talks, and holds them between its very hands so they don’t blink and miss something.

Do you see what I did there? I was going to write a paragraph about how in the past few years I have read more than a few novels that have, with beautiful scene setting, magnificent phrasing, off-balancing themes, caught me up in paragraph one, and held me longer than the story being told could have on its own merits. So, you say, they did well!! No, because the bottom did fall out. I did stop reading despite the words that were as beautifully shaped as a work of visual or tonal art. I lost interest in the story. Or in the protagonist. In such cases, I am especially disappointed, because the artistry promised so much. It is like the carapace of a gone butterfly–no longer growing, promising caterpillar, and nowhere the dusty, iridescent wings present to be admired.

Do you see what I did there? I got caught up in my visuals. My similes. My metaphors. My images. I got caught up in Kate the writer.

This is what these disappointing novels–novels of artifice and poorly told, or absent story, or worst!! buried story–do.

Look at me! A literary critic!

No credentials. Consider my expressed thoughts, or not, as you wish. Thanks for reading this far.

And as a small, additional nudge, I find that literary criticism is also becoming a form of beauty that wanders far away from its reason for being. I spend my time, while trying to read this critique of a particular book or writer for insights into the book or writer, looking up words for what they mean, and puzzling out allusions for what their insiders-only message might be.

That is it for today, for the second to the last day of October 2023, a month of deep sadnesses around the world. May we remember them to encourage not repeating them, to not repeat them.

Good aftermoon! While I type this at 2:51pm Eastern time, someones somewhere in the north american northwest is, I believe, viewing the annular solar eclipse. So, pun intended. Here in northeastern Massachusetts the clouds have slid in, so even if an edge were going to hint at the solar-lunar event, clouds get in my way (who sang that, Judy Collins? who wrote it, probably Joni Mitchell).

This morning I went on a sustainable-routes walk in and around the east campus of UMass-Lowell, which borders the Merrimack River, the Merrimack Riverway Walkway, the Northern Canal, and borders and/or has acquired and repurposed a former nursing home/geriatric facility, hospital outbuilding, and factory buildings into classrooms, dorms, offices, an outdoor activities and bicycle shop, an alumni services building, transformed a grass swath into a pair of 1800 square foot green houses that it manages with a local farm management/food security nonprofit. There was also a discussion in her tour for us of the original dwellers of the shores of the Merrimack River, those indigenous communities who like everywhere in this country, in every country where colonialism took root, were rooted out.

We learned a good deal more about the neighborhoods, the past and future of the area, all located in the need for and the work towards ensuring sustainability and the many pockets of responsibility that word lands in, but I will stop here and provide no more descriptors that would be helped by photographs, and apologize, because I didn’t take any. So use your imaginations, and whatever impression you first garner, ratchet it up a level or two. The university, like the city, is mastering reuse, not perfectly, but increasingly.

I should also note that the guide, a newly graduated UML student and now UML-Graduate School student gave us a statistic pertaining to the greenness of Lowell, touting the large number of trees herein. I will not dispute her, but I would wish that there were many more trees, grouped in pockets throughout the city–grouped for purposes of supporting each other, and linked to other pockets in that distances between pockets are minimal, and assisted by something that is missing in a big way in this city, street trees. Native species.

And from there I go to where I went next. I went to a walkway halfway across the city that attends the Concord River. I entered the way just upriver from the mouth of the Concord River, the mouth being where it pours into the Merrimack River. I went with purpose of observing birds, because today is Fall Big Bird Count day to coincide, I would say a bit late in the cycle, with the birds’ fall migrations to their winter homes (there is definitely truth in assigning the appellation “snow birds” to northern USAers who travel south in the winter months). In the past several years I have participated in these–the fall one and the spring one. Never have I observed such a dearth of birds as I did today.

This is not good.

So this has become a blog post in which the photograph captions are as long as the textual paragraphs. What does this mean? I am not parsing. And you are having to deal with it. Oh. Well, you can, and may have already, stop(ped) reading.

Go outside, see if you can see a change in light of any kind related to annular eclipse.

See if you can spot birds in your local trees, at your feeders, on your neighbor’s roof. I pray you are successful. I think I’ll go out and check again myself.

Good Saturday morning. It is early. It is cool. I have had a cup and a half of coffee and am considering brewing another pot. (French press; I brew enough at a time that it is marked on the pot as 3 cups, but I only get 1 1/2 cups/mugs per brew, and some days I just love coffee especially much. Today is one. I’ll be back shortly.)

Tomorrow, I just read, summer returns–into the 70s here, and 80s by Tuesday. Across the street my neighbor’s brother’s Honda Element is parked and carries a pink bicycle on a carrier. The tires are even pink! Three, no four, no five shades of pink on that cycle–seat, basket, frame, pedals, tires. Only the handle bars are chrome. I am surprised there aren’t tassels streaming from the handle bar ends. Oh, there it goes –Element driving away toting the pink bicycle. I guess someone has been to see the Barbie movie. I have not. Have you?

So, where am I going with this? I am at sixes and sevens. Where does that expression come from? I looked it up. Many uncertain responses (how appropriate): The wikipedia one includes: “It is not known for certain, but the most likely origin of the phrase is the dice game “hazard“, a more complicated version of the modern game of craps.” Michael Quinion, a British etymologist, writing on his website on linguistics, says, “It is thought that the expression was originally to set on cinque and sice (from the French numerals for five and six). These were apparently the most risky numbers to shoot for (‘to set on’) and anyone who tried for them was considered careless or confused.”

And further, still from the Wikipedia entry: “A similar phrase, “to set the world on six and seven”, is used by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Troilus and Criseyde. It dates from the mid-1380s and seems from its context to mean “to hazard the world” or “to risk one’s life”.^[2] William Shakespeare uses a similar phrase in Richard II (around 1595), “But time will not permit: all is uneven, And every thing is left at six and seven”.

These explanations leave me just there, at six and seven, or am I at five and six? The choice leaves me at sea! Well, I will decide, since I am writing in the English language, I will stay at sixes and sevens. Although cinque et sice rolls off the tongue nicely, not having to use the throat as gutturally as sixes and sevens. Say them out loud, I think you’ll feel what I mean.

You know, we’re in a lot of trouble in this world. I stew over it. I plant little trees all over the place (very little, so that public works people won’t uproot them as wrong for the place, as not likely to thrive.) My backyard the willingest recipient of my experiments. And in among the plants I have in pots in the diningroom I now have four beechnuts in pots. I have faith one or all will emerge. I don’t know.

I also pushed a fifth beechnut into a pot in the backyard, the pot right next to the pot of rosemary, which is next to the pot of sage, which is next to the pot of tomato and basil.

Here is a painting I would like to share. It is called Braces’s Rock, and is painted by Fitz Henry Lane in 1864.

I saw it and was captured. I stood in front of it at the Cape Ann Museum for, oh, ten or more minutes. Paused. Immovable. At peace. And yet: Brace’s Rock (Brace’s Cove) is historically one of the worst sailing hazards on the entire New England coast. “It deceptively appears to be an entrance to Gloucester harbor. Nowhere on Cape Ann is the illusion of a peaceful ocean more pronounced that Brace’s Cove seen on a still summer afternoon.” (from Brace’s Rock Series written by Sam Holdsworth, in an online project under the direction of the Cape Ann Museum) For just that small space of time just I standing before that small ripple of water, that strand of beach. Inattentive to the beached, broken boat.

Oh the places I could go with a conversation about this. What do we see when we look? What don’t we? Do we not because we turn? because we blink? because we won’t? or because we can’t?

But I am stopping here. Because I began with a cool, early morning. The morning has aged two and a half hours. I just had a visit from some local faith based visitors. They have come to my door before, with tracts and smiles and Jehovah. We converse. They will come again. We will converse again. They are very nice. They are ardent. As am I in what I hold as my story with God.

As I am in what I wish.

May we find peace. May we understand love. May we give it.

Have you ever wondered why we change our mind, sometimes? Actually, writing that sentence, I wonder at the visual: I see a physical mind replacement occurring. I am sure over the years myriad cartoonists have drawn such an image — a face with two hands reaching above it and lifting out a brain so to replace or rearrange or change it. There’s that. And, there’s the question, what comprises the mind? Physicists and philosophers, neurology focused persons, and psychologically focused persons all have theories. But facts?

What are facts?

I looked it up:

A fact is a true datum about one or more aspects of a circumstance. Standard reference works are often used to check facts. Scientific facts are verified by repeatable careful observation or measurement by experiments or other means

And then I remembered something I just read this morning that talked about the “fact” that repeatable careful observations or measurements enacted to verify the factness of facts, are not directly applicable to real life, because randomness is everpresent, and randomness disallows the inviolability of a fact. Randomness does not happen the same way each time, nor is it from the same place, nor is it the same size, shape, color, tone, weight, ….. So how can a controlled test (and are not tests, by definition, controlled?) both allow randomness and enable arriving at a fact? Can it do either?

Also, we can’t forget that any picture we are in, any place we are in, we are in, so we can’t, in fact, see it all.

Let’s move on. It just began to rain, and thunder is rolling along beside it. The humidity had gotten too full, and over it flowed. Would that it would abate. But at this very moment, I simply feel the air around me weighs just a little more. Ugh.

The other day a Night Heron stood on a rock across the Concord River from us and watched, and watched, and watched, and dunked! Up he raised his beak, back he leaned his head, and down his gullet he let the fish slide.

And, then, a day or so after the Night Heron, I got to watch a hummingbird case out and then consume sugar water, then flip away, only to fly back, then away, then back, ….. Imagine the energy consumption, and then also realize the understanding this tiny bird has of its limits and of its resources.

Then imagine their resources–both the flora and the feeders, sliding northward to keep out of the heat, and the encroaching heat waves becoming faster, larger, longer, wider. So the hummingbirds’ gauges are constantly reassessing, because summer is longer and hotter and yet wetter. When is it time to leave turn south now? The air, heavy, presses down on their backs. They cannot fly as far as fast in their thousands of miles seasonal migration.

And the rivers: one year up–flood stage one year down–herons’ feet stepping along bottom muck and tossed trash, one month up one month down, one week up and one week down. Dabblers losing their rock outcrop perches to rushing, overexerting and overtopped waterflows, carrying with their streams the often poisonous waste we thought we’d contained, or buried, or disguised to be drunk by the dabblers, the divers, the dunkers.

Oh me.

The beginning storm I mentioned earlier, has come, poured, rumbled and left. It is cooler now. There is that.

Pedaling along the Concord River, just before where it pours into the Merrimack River, at a point where it is sliced by a small island, which once was connected by bridge to the east bank, but now stands untrammeled except for one I-beam continuing the past of this place, I stopped to watch and hear the rushing of this river currently running very high along its banks. And I glimpsed someone else doing the same.

What a day this has become! And, I will tell you, this the second post I began today. The first I discarded. It was not reflecting this day here in New England. Rather it was arguing my fears of our future, my fears due to our past.

But today, I am reveling in this present, our present.

Have I told you this before?–Violets and their leaves are edible, and not only edible, quite tasty. My backyard abounds in violets. Each year they claim a few more inches (I would say feet, but the property just is, I believe 1/20th of an acre, and much of that is taken up by my house, driveway, and a shed. Beside the shed in the northeast corner receiving full noon to evening sun is my vegetable and rhubarb garden, which also hosts a huge stand of daisies, and in which I have now planted a tiny horse chestnut tree. If it grows, I will be happy. If it grows, I won’t have a vegetable garden, but rest assured, that shift in plant life is at least a decade from now. West of that garden space by several inches, well maybe a foot, is the plum tree I planted last year to replace the now absent beehive. Ah, I miss the bees. And west of the plum tree and as the yard becomes shaded by the dogwood tree, begin now, the violets, and they only stop when they meet the well overgrown but still recognizable triangle of bulbs and perennials — daffodils, tiger lilies, a few tulips I have pushed in here and there, soapwart, pinkweed,–, and a wild mulberry bush/tree, the fruit of which the birds robins and I think finches in particular enjoy. South of that triangle and continuing under the dogwood and onto and on the west edge of my backyard are more violets along with a smattering of ferns, until the grass that is holding firm just about level with the back edge of my house. Then grass decorated with ferns (I am pretty sure my property’s water table rides quite high below the surface). There are many other wildflowers growing there too, pink ladies, plantains, jack in the pulpits, lord, so many — I should bring the wildflower book out back and mark off all the varieties here.

Then just outside the westside kitchen window is a plant I bought several years ago at the Garden in the Woods in Framingham, Massachusetts. If ever you have the chance to visit there, do. It is unique and it is beautiful. The plant’s name I cannot remember, but its appeal to me was the fact that when it rains its pale green, scalloped leaves, resting horizontally beside each other, and slightly overlapping one another, hold rain drops aloft, like a table of dew drops, but it’s rain. Perhaps someone can tell me what this plant is?

South of this to be reidentified plant is a hefty stand of ferns, interspersed, right now with some rogue goldenrod. Just south of this stand of ferns is a very abundant stand of goldenrod, stretching along the house for two windows. There are other perennials that share much of the space the goldenrod reigns within, at other times of the year, toad something or others, lilacs, Queen Anne’s lace, some fleabane daisies, other wildflowers, and, in season, several different bulb and rhisome plants. Then there is a rose of sharon that is shedding itself a bit more each year. I think I have maybe two more years of its friendly white flowers with magenta centers. There is also a hydrangea that each year, as the shade from two large weeping birches expands, loses more of its share of sun, and flowers barely, maybe one maybe two blossoms. There are also sedum holding their own in the shade of those same birches. and increasing in girth each year are stands of lance corporals, whose red lance is just beginning to emerge now out of their tops.

The southeast corner of this lot, along the bottom of the driveway holds an unusual plum tree that rebirthed itself about 8 years ago, and fruited for three years, but did not fruit this year (nor did many flowering, or fruiting plants who time themselves with the peaches — an early spring start, that was rained out this year), as did not the azaleas that front my back porch facing the dogwood tree and the vegetable garden, nor my neighbor’s forsythia.

So I have taken you on a haphazard tour of my equally haphazard garden/grass/wildflower/treed property. And just want to remind you, the violets are delicious.

Thank you for joining me!

Ahh, but predictions are–tonight it will storm. And I just got my basement almost dry — not fully, because the water table languishing under this house must be above its abilities to drink what has been given it for its thirst, and is having to share it with my house foundation. I am grateful it is not a flood here. I am also grateful it is not a dustbowl.

I have been reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Reading it I am again reminded of the bane of individual land ownership on the health and well being of all beings–those who grow in place such as trees, and grasses, and all flora, those who by creation roam a terrain or airrain (such a word?) or waterrain (such a word?), and those who are us–what if no one owned, and everyone shared? If no one owned, would there be such drive to protect? Would there be a reason for greed?

A world without greed. How beautiful.

And respect. This from the book stays with me: “Someone (in a class learning the Potawatomi language) asks: ‘How do you say please pass the salt?’ Our teacher…. explains that while there are several words for thank you, there is no word for please. Food was meant to be shared, no added politeness needed; it was simply a cultural given that one was asking respectfully.”

Assuming respect. So often I see enacted, and undoubtedly enact myself, an assumption of disrespect from someone else, and gear up for it. And how does one gear up for disrespect? Either defensively or offensively–in each case with tension and distrust. How is that we live in such an uncomfortable state as our very way of life?

Notice the bark of this beech. It is pocked. It is likely enduring bark blight, which has been damaging many beeches, a major tree in the US Northeast. Bad enough, but now! Now the beeches are being attacked by a leaf disease that is rapidly decimating them! The tree here is enduring it now. This particular tree was not affected last year.

“Historically, a blight called beech bark disease has been the primary threat to the species. But now, beech leaf disease appears to pose a bigger danger. First spotted in northeastern Ohio, it causes parts of leaves to turn leathery and branches to wither. The blight can kill a mature tree within 6 to 10 years. It has now been documented in eight U.S. states and in Canada.” [from the journal Science, on line edition, 10 November 2021]

I will go to one more topic. The might Mo — the Merrimack River. She is a caged being, shackled here and there by dams, canals, purification plants (to undo what we discard) and yet she rules.

I have seen the Merrimack River higher, seen it breach its banks, but I have never seen it so much of a force. This was after the rains in mid-July that wreaked havoc upriver and in Vermont and western New Hampshire.

There is much to be concerned about. But there is beauty and through it there is hope.

It is two days shy of Bastille Day. Who remembers what was taught about Bastille Day in school? Is it still taught? Who remembers the title of Charles Dickens’ novel that pertains to the events surrounding Bastille Day?

Read this explanation from Wikipedia. Interesting contrast in the event(s) being celebrated year over year:

Bastille Day is the common name given in English-speaking countries to the national day of France, which is celebrated on 14 July each year. In French, it is formally called the Fête nationale française ; “French National Celebration”; legally it is known as le 14 juillet ; “the 14th of July”.

The French National Day is the anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, a major event of the French Revolution, as well as the Fête de la Fédération that celebrated the unity of the French people on 14 July 1790. 

France is in much heat right now, every meaning of that word. What will it be like in France on July 14th, 2023?

Theirs is not the only country in heat.

The world is in much heat, again, every meaning of that word. How can we each participate in cooling the heats?

How can we cool ourselves off without offsetting heat caused somewhere else to someone or something else? How can we be cool? In every meaning of that word.

Can we envision cool or not-hot? Can we exhibit it? Can we find within ourselves peace and care and wonder and bask in and share it?

I am thinking of how we opine. How I opine. What makes me so sure my view should prevail? How do I test it for validity? For value? For purpose? For accuracy? By what measure do I consider a differing opinion? Am I capable of learning outside of what I “know” to be? How do I “know” what I know? Can I get out of my own way to see what know is? Can I know what I know without my experience? Is knowing only experiential? If so, is it ever able to be all right? To the latter question I say I don’t think so.

So what to do?

Consider motive. Consider heart. Consider my motive every moment. Consider my reason for knowing and holding onto that knowing of a thing a thought a purpose a fact.

Consider getting out of my own way. Ask–ask who?–how to do that; if it can be done.

Joshua 24:15

Yesterday someone asked me, are you going to blog about your trip to Alaska? And I said, well I did! I did, but it was topical on loss, on loss this earth and all its elements continue to experience. It started with delight, local seasonal delight but it drifted northwest of here and downhill (figuratively).

I will try again. I will tell you about what beauty there is there. What beauty there is and could be anywhere, seen by looking, felt by touching, heard by listening, smelled by sniffing, tasted by I don’t know, tasting! And we can attend with expectation of surprise, of something new, of beauty, of worth. We can, any time we want–expectation is, is it?, without precedent.

Many things I’ve read recently seem to be playing with the idea, the physics and the philosophy of what one perceives is very much the product of what one brings to the moment. The fact of objectivity is? therefore? not fact. We can’t get out of our own way.

Well!! see, I have veered off the proposed path, even before stepping on it.

Alaska, the silence was what held me the tightest. These enormous shards in myriad shades of green, and the even huger white shards toss me into silence. Were I sitting among those trees. Were I sitting on that ice that snowpack, those boulders indigenous and erratic, and inclined my ear (inner and outer) toward an inch, a foot, 100 feet of it, I would hear myriad small, near and distant scratchings, hummings, huffings, and even whisperings. But at the feet of these giants, at their feet or far off in a body of water the dimensions of which I cannot fathom, I am placed in and brought to silence.

June looks well in green. A color of shadows and shades. Emerald, jade, forest, mint, basil, sage, juniper, moss, chartreuse, pine… And June looks well in the lights. In buttercup yellow, lemon yellow, second round dandelion yellow, and rose red, and rose pink, and dutch iris lavender, turtle flower purple.

June provides robust arugula and round, red radishes, and tall, sturdy, umbrellaed rhubarb stalks, raspberries-in my garden, bird-consumed before they can recolor from granular green to ruby red, the sturdy, prolific meadow green leaves of violets, waving and bowing fully unfurled ferns. Dusky sage, blue-green rosemary, yellow-green basil.

In the Tongass National Forest, well, actually on the very edge of one island with the land masses and interspersed waterways within southeast Alaska that are within the designated Tongass National Forest-a temperate-zone rain forest, much green of cedar and pine prevails, as in Wrangell-St. Elias National Forest just north of it. But slashes of brown, where land has slid down the nearly vertical mountains, standing just back of the waterways on each island, spit, peninsula, jetty, jut, or continental edge, hurt to see, to know it is because too much water too fast hurtled down toward receiving waters uprooting massive, passive, wind whistling red and yellow cedars, whose roots do not need to go deep for their trunks to grow tall, but whose roots do need something to sustain them, to provide the mycorrhizal exchange of nourishment and to hold onto, that will feed them and hold them to (don’t we all need such), from which, with downrushing rainstorm streams, they are loosed and as a kid on a slide (smooth surface, no grabbable grit)–first the “grit” is borne downhill tumbling in the hurtle of water, and then the now unrooted cedars, are knocked back at the knees and they are trajectoried perilously downward.

This is a rain forest you say, it is how it is. But at this latitude, it is also historically a snow forest. And, while rain totals in Tongass have risen in the past few years unlike most other parts of world, the heat of the worldwide drought is here too, and the snow totals have fallen far. Too far. No pack. No seasonal predictability. No seasonal order, random mishaps random disasters. Unfed until starved brown, cedars still stand tall until the insult-to-injury rainfall, and then they are uprooted and fall and slide.

I sit at my desk on this very becoming June day in Massachusetts. I wonder today at tomorrow. I wonder each day at the next. But first, before I concern myself with that, I wonder of today.

May you. Because to wonder wants to learn, but also wonder wants always to delight in. May you.

This morning, I bicycled to a local not for profit urban farm market to check out their annual sale of plants to buy. I bought a four pack of cherry tomatoes, figuring I could figure out how to carry those safely on my bicycle (two options I knew to work, gingerly–bungee corded to the shelf over the rear tire, or carefully held in my ever-present across the chest “shopping bag”). I considered buying eggplant and pickling cucumbers as well, but knew better. There would be a challenging pedaling home the two miles to my house, a good portion of it up a pair of challenging hills–the cost of buying at a farm market at river’s edge and living in “the highlands” of my city. The name is accurate, the ride home from anywhere local is some amount of up hill.

Anyway, I was waiting to pay for my four pack of tomatoes, when a neighbor appeared beside me and seeing me holding them and my bicycle helmet, said to me, “I will take your plants home for you.” You can’t beat that. What a kindness. So I got to meander home along the river and watch it fall over the Pawtucket falls, and listen to and spot the myriad warblers, some passing through and some hanging out for the summer, and the song sparrows, and the warbling vireos, and the redwing blackbirds, and the robins, and etc. It was a lovely, leisurely pedal and for the uphill parts I didn’t have to be conscious of any items on the back of me or under my arm.

And!! The clouds held out as merely clouds until I was two blocks from home, and then only released some drizzle until I was able to put away the bicycle, prepare the soil for the four arriving plants, then receive the plants, visit with my neighbor for awhile, and plant the plants! Only as I was patting down the dirt around the final tomato plant did the rain kick into a downpour. You can’t beat that!

What a day.

And!! I am counting herrings at the fish ladder again this year. And by happenstance, three weeks ago when I set up my schedule, I didn’t choose today as a day to stand at water’s edge and count! So far, my days have involved only sunny/clear or 3%/25% cloudy (two of the options we have for reporting weather conditions on the phoneapp that we report our sightings on). Two recent ones incorporated a bit of a chill, actually a big chill, but, really, complain? Not I.

And the rain falling steadily outside my window. NEEDED!! And beautiful. I did dawdle outdoors after finishing the tomato plant placing, and did get very wet. But, it was my choice. And indoors was 7 feet away from where I stood.

What a day.

The other day, one full of sun, in a very small space of a pretty small bog/pond, we spotted a very long but tightly wound around itself water snake, gorgeous wet brown skin glinting in the sun, two notable frogs noses and backs above water line, two substantial turtles noses above the waterline, so many water happy plants, a fish or four, a party of red wing blackbirds, robins, chickadees, titmice, warblers, an oriole. What a day.

May your day be one that is.