(he/she never did get a turn)
bluebird bath at high noon
(he/she never did get a turn)
Tag: summer
(he/she never did get a turn)
golden hours
🌻
The sun is rich
And gladly pays
In golden hours,
Silver days,
And long green weeks
That never end.
~ John Updike
(A Child’s Calendar, June)
🌻
the days are hot, hot
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)
wordless wednesday
four seasons photo hunt
Back in January of this year, Karma (Karma’s When I Feel Like It Blog) suggested a four seasons photo hunt. I decided to include four more “seasons,” taking photos on Groundhog Day, May Day, Lammas Day and Halloween, which fall between the solstices and equinoxes. I will come back and add the final picture to this post when we get to the winter solstice.
Courtyard Gardens
North Carolina Botanical Garden
as summer becomes a memory
I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.
~ Georgia O’Keeffe
(Letter to Russell Vernon Hunter, October 21, 1933)
It’s been a curious summer. Very little went as planned. As many of my readers know, I’ve long been trying to go through all the family history items we inherited after our grandparents’ houses on Cape Cod were sold. Before we moved to North Carolina I went through and discarded many of the things from their attics and closets, but still wound up transporting 14 boxes of stuff down here. My goal for this summer was to take advantage of being stuck inside to go through the boxes and organize all of it by family lines into my special acid-free notebooks.
Well, I only got through 4 boxes and am in the middle of the 5th! Each box is 12″x14″x18″ and is crammed full of pictures and paperwork! I’m still throwing a lot of things away, but I’m going through every piece of paper with a fine-tooth comb and in doing so have found many treasures. Reading every letter, every deed, every will, every newspaper clipping, every vital record and naturalization certificate. My notebooks are filling up fast. I’ve added a few more of them to the shelves. The pictures are being set aside to be sorted out after the paperwork is done.
I feel like a curator, managing this huge collection. I feel like I’m ‘being myself again’ after all. These summer days have been so enjoyable and a labor of love. I’m looking forward to sharing more of the stories about our ancestors that I’ve discovered, but am determined for now not to stop until finished. So this will be a year-round project going forward. There’s no way I’m willing to wait until next summer to start in again!
The pictures are going to be more difficult to deal with because, sadly, so many of them are unidentified. But the paperwork is fun to read. The above letter was written by a lawyer (?) to Tim’s 2nd-great-grandfather, Delorma Brown Hubbard, advising him about a search for a will in England. It was written in 1869.
The oldest piece of paper found so far was a hand-written ‘article of agreement’ between Tim’s 4th-great-grandfather and two of his sons, signed by him in 1837! It’s quite something to be holding a document that was in his ancestor’s hands 187 years ago.
I’m also in the process of taking my ancestor blog posts and turning them into stationary web pages. The growing list of pages can be found near the left bottom of my blog’s sidebar.
And so my work continues!
garden pictures, more seed tick misery
old man’s beard (?)
2004 NC Wildflower of the Year
2016 NC Wildflower of the Year
aka prairie aster, sneezewort aster, upland white aster, upland white goldenrod
under the trees
Cedar Falls Park, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
We are all woodland people. Like trees, we hold a genetic memory of the past because trees are parents to the child deep within us. We feel that shared history come alive every time we step into the forest, where the majesty of nature calls to us in a voice beyond our imaginations. But even in those of us who haven’t encountered trees in months or even years, the connection to the natural world is there, waiting to be remembered.
~ Diana Beresford-Kroeger
(To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest)
At last! A day arrived with low humidity and a chance for a walk in the woods. Though I was tempted to visit the botanical garden I was drawn here to visit a new-to-us park we had discovered some time ago while out running errands in the heat. We found lots of interesting things growing under the trees in this lovely park.
The trees at Cedar Falls Park are typical of an upland forest in the Piedmont, with oak and hickory predominating and here and there a pine tree. Second growth trees with a brushy understory line both sides of the trails near the northern part of the park.
~ This Way to Nature website
(thanks to Debbie for the identification)
They would worry about wearing me out, but I could also see that I was a reminder of all they feared: chance, uncertainty, loss, and the sharp edge of mortality. Those of us with illnesses are the holders of the silent fears of those with good health.
~ Elisabeth Tova Bailey
(The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating)
The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.
~ Barbara Kingsolver
(Animal Dreams)
Finding the snail moving across the blue mushroom and then the patch of partridge berries simply filled me with delight!
close to overflowing
Tim recorded 5½ inches in his rain gauge from Tropical Storm Debby. We never lost power and I think the storm had technically weakened to a tropical depression by the time it reached here. (We never got a tropical storm warning here either.) All the same, it was good to be safe inside and hunkered down for a day.
We heard reports of tornados and flooding elsewhere in nearby counties so we were lucky. Today we drove down to Bolin Creek Trail to get a good look at the creek and it was close to overflowing. The pictures taken there last September show what the creek looked like when the water was low and the stones were visible in the streambed. See here.
Today the sky is blue with white puffy clouds and the sun is bright and warm. We already have a feels like temperature of 90°F and tomorrow promises to be even warmer.