Rachel just harvested this huge pile of lettuce from one end of our raised beds and it didn’t even make a dent. It’s salad season!
It all started with a post from Alan Jacobs about that Apple ad, which pointed me to this post by L.M. Sacasas, which led me to his post on Albert Borgmann, which led me to this pdf chapter from Borgmann’s book. This is a rich vein. I don’t recall why I unsubscribed to Sacasas, but error corrected.
Recently my in-laws asked me to refinish their dining room table and chairs. They’ve brought it over and now the project has begun. I have a plan, which I’m testing on one of the leaves. If you hear nothing further about the project, that means it failed and I’m too embarrassed to admit it. 😄
Starlings…sheesh. Not only are they:
- An invasive species whose introduction can be blamed on Shakespeare fanatics,
- Bullies, and
- Absolute devourers of seed,
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…