a second cousin, twice removed

Helen Hamilton (1896-1954)

Saturday afternoon I opened box #9 of the 14 family history boxes I’m going through. In it I found this magazine page, torn from the August 1915 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. The portrait sketch of Miss Helen Hamilton was done by Harrison Fisher, an American artist born in 1875 in Brooklyn, New York, known for his illustrations of women.

Turns out Helen Hamilton was a second cousin of Tim’s grandmother, Allegra Hamilton. They were great-granddaughters of Benjamin Hamilton (1792-1880). Helen was about 19 years old in this sketch. She went on to marry Frederick Vincent and Allegra married Tim’s grandfather, Karl Rodgers. I wonder how well they knew each other, as Helen lived in California and Allegra lived in New York. I don’t know most of my second cousins.

This box is densely packed with newspaper clippings, correspondence, and research notes from Tim’s great-grandmother, Gertrude Hubbard. It’s going to take me a long time to get it organized! That’s okay, though, I’ve got a long hot summer ahead of me.

Meanwhile, I’ve been enjoying the cardinals singing in the wax myrtle tree outside my kitchen window every morning.

when there is no water in view

“Along the Creek” by T. C. Steele

A June landscape is incomplete without water. Best of all, the river; but if not this, then a creek, a brook, or even the quiet mill-pond. However pleasant the day may be, the breeze cool, the blossoms bright, the shade dense, the sunshine tempered, there still is something wanting. The world has an unfinished look when there is no water in view, and wild life is largely of the same opinion. I have often found many an upland field almost deserted when the meadows and the river bank were crowded.
~ Charles Conrad Abbott
(Days Out of Doors)

the days are hot, hot

“The Summer House” by John Henry Twachtman

Everywhere, from sunup to sunup, the world is full of song. The days are hot, hot, and all the day long I listen to the bees lifting from flower to flower, to the watchful chipmunk sounding its chock chock chock alarm while the red-tailed hawk wheels, crying, high in the sky. I can’t see the songbirds in the dappled light of a thousand leafy branches, but I can hear them calling from the trees.
~ Margaret Renkl
(The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year)

throwback thursday

5.29.16 ~ Virtu Art Festival
Wilcox Park, Westerly, Rhode Island

Every day my cell phone sends me a random selection of pictures it has taken in the past. When this whimsical photo of a lion popped up I wondered where on earth it came from! Turns out it was taken nine years ago at an art festival we used to love to go to, even though I honestly don’t remember this particular piece.

Some people have a way of arranging everything about them, so the objects take on not only their own meaning, and a relation to the other things displayed with them, but something more besides — an indefinable aura that belongs as much to their invisible owner as to the objects themselves.
~ Diana Gabaldon
(Voyager)

I am one of those people who carefully curates all the meaningful objects I’ve collected over the years. And a good many of these mementos have come from artists with booths at the Virtu Art Festival in Westerly, Rhode Island. A close up photograph of a barred owl on a snowy evergreen, infused onto a sheet of aluminum… A uniquely shaped turned wood vase with a tall spire-shaped lid… A glazed earthenware pot with a little bunny head on the rim on one side, and a little bunched-up bunny tail on the other side… I didn’t buy every year we went, but if I fell in love with something I was more than willing to break the budget to bring it home.

I do miss those days! All my most precious keepsakes survived the drastic downsizing we did to move down here, and they have been arranged anew, still, perhaps going forward it’s a good thing that I’ll no longer be tempted to add even more “objects” to my home.

a field of daisies

“Field of Daisies” by Efim Volkov

In the human order creativity is neither a rational, deductive process nor an irrational wandering of the undisciplined mind but the emergence of beauty as mysteriously as the blossoming of a field of daisies out of the dark Earth.
~ Thomas Berry
(The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century)

operation spider web

On June 1, Ukrainian forces struck deep inside Russia in “Operation Spider Web.” One hundred and seventeen drones, each operated by its own pilot, hit airfields in five regions. Ukraine says the drones hit 41 strategic bombers that had been attacking Ukrainian cities and destroyed at least 13 of them. Russia does not have the industrial capabilities to replace them. ….. The operation took more than 18 months of planning. It apparently involved sending trucks loaded with wooden cabins that had detachable roofs that could be opened remotely. Unsuspecting truck drivers hauled the cabins to locations near airbases, where the drones launched. …..Once the drones were in the air, the vehicles carrying the cabins exploded. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said the people who helped with the operation from within Russia had been withdrawn and “are now safe.” ….. Russia denied that the damage was that extensive, but there is no doubt that the attack was a significant blow to Russia’s war effort, demonstrating as it does that Ukraine can bring the war home. ….. Analysts recognize the Ukrainian attack as a new moment in warfare.
~ Heather Cox Richardson
(Letters from an American, June 3, 2025)

Слава Україні! 🌻 Slava Ukraini! 🌻 Glory to Ukraine!

(image credit: pixabay)

on a happier note

The clearing rests in song and shade.
It is a creature made
By old light held in soil and leaf,
By human joy and grief,
By human work,
Fidelity of sight and stroke,
By rain, by water on
The parent stone.
~ Wendell Berry
(This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems)

It seems like it’s been raining and dreary for the past couple of weeks — we even turned the heat on a couple of times. But we’ve been seeing a lot of interesting creatures outside our windows, like this baby bunny I caught with my camera. One morning I saw two opossums scrounging around in the leaf litter for food, and another time I saw a coyote trotting across the back yard.

One day when returning from grocery shopping we were very excited to find four fledgling Carolina wrens trying out their wings on the wax myrtle branches in our front yard. And those darling Carolina chickadees who nested in our birdhouse had some little ones, too. They flit about so quickly I can’t count them but there are at least three and I got to see a parent feeding one of them.

And one delightful afternoon Kat and I designed a dragon garden to fill in the unused birdbath in the front yard. 💜