Starlings…sheesh. Not only are they:
their chicks are noisy and needy, despite being as big as the adults. We don’t harm them, but we don’t love them either.
Cory Doctorow: “AIs and self-driving cars are the new jetpacks”
I don’t know if this will prove to be true but it’s an interesting provocation.
Pileated woodpecker at the feeder on our back porch. These are our celebrity sightings.
Last day of high school for Darcy! It’s a bit sad, of course, but honestly we’re all three ready for this phase of her life to be over. She had a tough senior year and she’s ready for the next phase to begin. Now just to figure out what that looks like…
For a brief time in the spring here in the White River watershed, the redbuds fairly glow with their pale purple blooms. It’s one of the signs of the shifting seasons. You suddenly notice how widespread the trees are: all over the hillsides, along the roads. Who knew that those small trees–unnoticed for the rest of the year–were capable of such beauty?
As I write this, our neighbor is having his healthy redbud cut down. Something about it making a mess on his roof. Suffice it to say we have very different ideas about trees.
During that spring bloomtime, I can walk up my stairs and see the redbud framed in our bedroom window. It’s astonishing, every time.
One day I had been changing clothes in our bedroom with the door shut. As I turned to leave, I was caught up by the light playing on the door. Later, I wrote the following:
I reach to open–
pause–the redbud behind me
glorifies the door.
Rachel and I went out to the nightmarescape that is our backyard in the dark after the rain. Slugs and snails everywhere, even eating each other. Enormous nightcrawlers that dive lightning-quick into the soil. Pill bugs everywhere. All doing good work, but goodness it was a bit of a horror show. 😄
A crow has showed up in our backyard a few times now to eat seed. We’re that much closer to our goal of making friends with a corvid…
“How Jung and Tolkien Tapped into the Collective Unconscious”
One of my finds from my Friday drive was a Stanley no. 80 cabinet scraper. $15, which I thought was a pretty good price for one in such good condition. There was minor rusting on the hardware that came right off after a few hours in vinegar. Replacement blade coming from Lee Valley Tools.
Wonderful, ten minute documentary about the Zuni Map Project—an art project to “depict the topography of myth, memory, and prayer embedded in the land, returning a tool of power to a space of connection.”