June 16 Fox-and-cubs, a most charming name for this flower, which is also called orange hawksbeard, the devil’s paintbrush. orange hawk bit and mysteriously, Grim-the-collier (a collier being a coal miner or charcoal maker). How is it already June 16? The days are long and full, though I spend many minutes a day simply watching…
210614 Tanager Music
June 14 Drizzly rain today most of the day, we have had only 4 or 5 mm.; it’s cooler and very windy, blowing from the south-east, unusual. I have a bird app, called BirdNET, which records and analyses bird song for identification. It kept telling me that the whistling I was hearing was a scarlet…
210610 Journey Eclipse
June 10 Solar Eclipse: Rahu, who was beheaded for drinking the nectar of the gods, tried to get revenge by consuming the sun, but without a body, the sun came out the other side! We purchased this painting in Bali, Indonesia, in 1983. The references I find on-line blur the myth we learned in Indonesia…
210608 snake spit
June 8 “Where have you BEEN?!”, asked 12 year old Rain the moment I came in the door. Even now, my oldest and my grandchildren are at the door as I come in, with questions and calls for attention. I should consider it a compliment! I am needed and loved. Snake spit on the plants….
210531 Lush (also dogs, rant, recipes)
May 31 In just a few weeks this has happened. Lush. The beautiful jack-in-the-pulpit: before this spring I had only ever seen one or two of these, in the woods of Ontario. The flower grows beneath the leaves, which look like large trillium leaves, three to a stem. ***** Mumma: “Doesn’t it seem to you…
210529 …until the cows come home!
May 29 The cows came mooing and mooing up our hill to spend a few weeks here. The farmer rotates the herd around several properties during the summer. Later they will be taken over to Rain and Tal’s farm. This morning they are gathered by the old barn. One is nibbling on the wise witch….
210526 His Spirit Is Called Home
May 26 Sometime in the night Fig called to me and I gathered him up and took him to bed with me. He died while I slept with him cuddled against my chest. We spent yesterday sitting on the porch watching the clouds and the birds. It was a good day. Fig lay on the…
210525 Fig and Waiting
May 25 Fig is going to die soon. He weighs less than half what he weighed in September. He has diabetes, which means he cannot, without insulin shots (which he isn’t getting), keep enough sugar in his bloodstream to keep his body alive. He has a heart malfunction called a murmur which means he can’t…
210522 The Long Weekend, the Green Forest and a Travois.
May 22 The green forest. More violets – these are different, taller and with stems from which the leaves branch, rather than forming a crown from the root. White and yellow, although I think they are the same plant. ***** The long weekend: a weekend of Canadian rituals, with gardening first up: traditionally,…
210521 Food Covid Geese.
May 20 A different trillium! Smaller than the white ones in Ontario and the first white I have seen here. The common polypody fern: the first you learn. And this is the only polypody I’ve seen here. It is 30 degrees! I took Fig to the stream. It is flowing very lightly since we have…