Look who's back!

So far, I've seen only a couple of these garter snakes, but it has been cool and they may be waiting to come out. They are on a terrace step, and it is just perfect for them because of the warm stone and the little bit of grass and dandelion that sprouted in the crack. There is a second head there between two blades of grass. If you want to read last year's snake posts, they are here, and here.

A thank you note

This is a public thank you note to my friend, Les, for the absolutely fantastic Mother's Day card! I thought you all might enjoy seeing it.

Today's picture/Mama Robin

This is probably as close as I'll get to the mother robin while she sits on those eggs! I had to take the photo from the study window. If you click on it, you can see her more clearly. I don't think she ever closes her eyes. Rather like human mothers. :<) Whenever we get too near the nest, she flies away into the nearby locust tree and scolds us until we leave. We aren't sitting on the porch at all until those babies hatch and fly away.

Further Afield/Susy's Garden

I love visiting gardens. Not the big, famous gardens necessarily, but those personal gardens filled with flowers the owners cherish. Each one is different, and special based on choice of plants, zone, layout of the land. Judi's is an in-town, shady, lush garden. Ginny's is a small, more formal space at the entrance to her house. Yesterday we spent Mother's Day at our friend Susy's house, and her garden is different from both of theirs, and mine. She lives out in the country on ten acres, yet has neighbors she can see and hear from the top of her hill. Her land used to have an apple orchard, and over the years her late husband mowed walkways, so that now, even as trees have grown up, there is a wonderful path that takes us over many of those ten acres. There are some huge beech trees, but most of the trees are smaller. It felt more like a British "wood" than my "woods." Down closer to the house, there are flowers everywhere. Trillium under a big pine, ground phlox and vinca spilling down a hill, a new, "secret" garden off the deck. There are flowers and herbs all mixed together, just the way I love them, in a "cottage-y" effect. There are surprises around every corner. I was in garden heaven.

As you know, we are on a hill as well, but the garden spaces and plants are quite, quite different. Susy is two or three zones warmer than us (who isn't?!). Our woods are further away from the house itself, and there are lawns and pastures all around. We have more and deeper woods, but they are not so close to the house to protect it much from wind, or to give us that feeling of being a little home in the woods. Susy's woods adjoin the driveway and the edge of the open land to give more of a cozy feeling. There are trees nearby the house which offer shade on a sunny day. Other than our porch, we are pretty much in the sun. I would like to have more spaces of dappled shade and intimacy, but this isn't easy to achieve here. As gardeners, as homeowners, or apartment dwellers, we must live with our surroundings, and grow what does best. Desert plants in arid areas, shady plants in the woods, and strong, hardy plants out in the open. It is a challenge, but a fun one, and this is a joy of gardening; that each garden is individual and perfect in its own way.

Susy walking on the pathTrillium
Vinca
May Flowers or Bluets
Bloodroot
Primrose
Ground phlox

Stereophonic Sound

If you've been around a while, you might remember the early days of stereo, when you could hear the words out of one speaker and the music out of the other. Well, I just went outdoors at nine o'clock at night, and on my left I heard spring peepers, and on my right I heard the woodcock. It was wonderful. I found the following photos on the internet.

Today's picture/Bzzz

New blogger

If you have ever left a message on my blog, you'll know that I use that letter-verification thing; and I moderate comments. Because I do this, I have always 'allowed' anonymous comments, i.e. comments from people without blogs. I have met some very, very nice people this way, and one of them is Alison, who has just started her own blog with this fantastic name, Lovely Little Moony Night. Go ahead over, and introduce yourself. You'll enjoy your visit.

The Southern Reading Challenge

Even though I said I wasn't going to join any challenges, the Southern Reading Challenge, which Maggie offers is right up my alley. Here are the rules:

3 Southern Setting Books by Southern Authors in 3 Months beginning May 15 through August 15!

My three choices are:

Meet Me At The Butterfly Tree
A Fairhope Memoir
by Mary Lois Timbes and Robert E. Bell

Sartoris
by William Faulkner

The Prince of Frogtown
by Rick Bragg

Serviceberry

Just about a year ago, I took a "walk on nature's wild side" and mentioned the serviceberry. It is in bloom again, and Tom said he wanted to write about it, so here is our guest commentator:

When I was a kid, my mother always said, "When you first see the shadbush bloom in the woods, the black flies aren't far behind." Kids mostly ignore what their parents say, but for some reason this adage stuck. In fact, I saw my first shad yesterday and called my mother to tell her. She said, "I know. I didn't want to call you." At first glance, shad looks like small apple blossoms; but it's too early in the spring. Shadbush, which is named because it blooms at the time when the shad come upstream to spawn, is also called serviceberry. When I called my mother last night I told her this. She didn't know. Serviceberry blooms at the time of year in northern New England when in the olden days people who had died during the winter were buried. Early May was the month when the burial service took place. Shad or serviceberry, it doesn't matter--here come the black flies!

Quote du jour/John Burroughs

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
John Burroughs


When we bought this farm I was under two misapprehensions. One, that a lot of stray animals would be dropped off here, and two, that there would be birds' nests above doors, on the porch, and under the eaves. Well, in the twenty-seven years (this month) since we bought this place, we have had one stray cat, and then, Ben. And we have never, ever had a nest near the house. The swallows come year after year to the wooden box we put up on the telephone pole out back, and we've had robins in a nest on the side of the barn, and phoebes in the barn, but this is the very first year we've had a bird's nest really, really near the house. Check this out! It is built on a trellis, which supports the Dutchman's Pipe. I am so, so tickled. I moved the bocce balls and badminton rackets from underneath. I so look forward to baby robins.



This is the nature I have photos of. There are two features I 'just' saw, and heard of, with no photos. I looked out the window today, up the road, and suddenly what I thought was brush started moving, and it was a mother and baby deer. Simply magic. Then, further afield, my daughter was running a couple towns away today, and a baby bear crossed her path. She didn't see the mother, thank goodness.

And then in closing, here is a picture of the animals in the north pasture for the first time this year. They love being there as, I think, shows in this photo.

My Sunday in America

You may have noticed in the sidebar that I am doing a special "Sunday reading" this year. The book is tremendous, and each week I jot down a bit in my email drafts folder so that when I come to write the book report, I'll recall the individual churches the author visits each Sunday for a year. I've tried to think about a way to do this report in segments, because otherwise that next Easter book report will be mighty long. :<) Anyhow, this Sunday, I had my own visitation to a church which is not the one I attend. After reading this book for seven Sundays, I found myself wanting to jot down some impressions of this service.

A dear young boy, whom we have known since his birth, celebrated his First Communion today at a Roman Catholic church a couple towns away from us. The first thing that struck me was that the church was packed, and this wasn't a small church. I'm used to attending my beautiful little church and finding it not even half-full. Oftentimes, there are more in the choir than in the congregation. This may be because the church is in the midst of a search for a new rector, and we are in-between right now. Though this shouldn't matter. It should be the service, not the preacher; still, that's the way it is. The church may have been so crowded because there were twenty candidates, more than the priest has ever had, and relatives came from all over to attend.

The second thing I noticed is that the priest was young; under fifty. I haven't seen a young, energetic priest in a long, long time. He was wonderful with the kids. They got up and read lessons, and each spoke a prayer. Prior to the service, they all baked bread to share with their own families in the family meal. He had them renew their baptismal vows, and afterward took a fir branch and walked down the aisle, dipping it in holy water and gently sprinkling the congregation. He talked to these seven and eight year olds about what this day was all about, saying today they will be eating with the "grown-ups."

With great joy, he told us all that his favorite days were Christmas, Easter, and First Communion Sunday. I found out later that he is a DJ and puts on dances for the local kids, not just Catholics but everyone. He coaches a basketball team. This is the kind of priest we used to see everywhere; youthful, and involved with youth, as in those old Bing Crosby movies, and in the television program, Ballykissangel.

After the service, we went to the home of the grandparents, our longtime friends. All their kids were there, except the one who lives far away. There was a four year old granddaughter, and a daughter-in-law who is pregnant, and a new step-brother of the boy who took his First Communion today. Lots of people, lots of great, home-cooked food, (including the bread he had made - cut into pieces so we each got to share it) and lots of love and warmth and joy. It was really as perfect a time as I've ever had.

Book Report/Home to Holly Springs

Home to Holly Springs
The First of the Father Tim Novels
by Jan Karon
fiction, 2007
finished 5/3/08

In Home to Holly Springs, Father Tim gets a note that says, "Come home." That's it. No other words. No signature. Yet he feels compelled to go home; back to Holly Springs, Mississippi, where he was born and raised. As a person who still lives in the area where I was brought up, I know that to others, those who have moved away, our hometown is different, changed, not the same. But to me who has watched it through the changes, it is not so shocking. When we do move away, we expect our childhoods to be as pressed flowers in a book. We want our house to look the same and for Main Street to have the same stores. On a deeper level, sometimes people leave to escape a sad childhood. They leave behind troubles and angers and disappointments, thinking they won't crop up again if they live somewhere else. We have seen throughout the Mitford books that Father Tim does have secrets and pain in his past. In this book, when he gets the note, he decides to go back, whatever the cost.

I'm not going to give away one little thing from this book. If you love Father Tim, and have loved the Mitford series, I'll only say, please read this one. It fills in the spaces for the reader. We learn a lot about his past. It is lovely because Jan Karon includes parts from the other books, episodes we remember, little vignettes that made us want more details.

As you may recall, when Light From Heaven ended, Father Tim and Cynthia were supposed to embark on an Ireland trip come summer, but she hurts her ankle and they postpone it. Because of the injury, Father Tim takes Barnabas, the dog, now nicknamed 'The Old Gentleman,' on his journey home.

There is a very funny misprint in the book when they meet up again in Memphis.

Now allowed to drink, she had lost no time in renting a car and amusing herself at the library, a museum, and the bookstores.

Of course, it was meant to read "to drive" but this made me laugh out loud.

We meet many new friends in this book, and when Father Tim says he'll be back, I sure hope he will. I want to spend more time with all these folks. Oh, how I loved this book.

First food from the garden/Chives

Isn't that just the greenest green! I've got baked potatoes in the oven, and I'll serve them along with roasted garlic, and a bunch of chopped chives. And yes, we do make a meal of baked potatoes. :<)

Today's poem - Old Roses by Donald Hall

There is a tremendous piece about Donald Hall here, with many photographs of him, and his home. Tom's mom sent us the print issue, and I was so pleased to find it online to share it with you. After his time as Poet Laureate, he says:

I come back to this house, in which I have felt so much emptiness since her death [his wife, poet Jane Kenyon who died in 1995], and because I can't work, I find myself with nothing to do. For so many years I was writing poems about Jane. I've become more and more naked as a poet, particularly after Jane's death. Then I came to the end of that. Something had changed, and language doesn't come to me anymore.


Here is a poem from a 1978 collection called Kicking The Leaves.

Old Roses

White roses, tiny and old, hover among thorns
by the barn door.
For a hundred years
under the June elm, under the gaze
of seven generations,
they floated briefly,
like this, in the moment of roses,
by the fields
stout with corn, or with clover and timothy
making sweet hay,
grown over, now,
with milkweed, sumac, paintbrush....
Old
roses survive
winter drifts, the melt in April, August
parch,
and men and women
who sniffed roses in spring and called them pretty
as we call them now,
strolling beside the barn
on a day that perishes....

Today's pictures/Opening Day

First violets
First dandelion

Further Afield/Ginny's Spring Garden

This evening we visited my dear cousin, Ginny, and these are the flowers that greeted us at the entrance to her house.

Quote du jour/Edwin Way Teale

The world's favorite season is the spring. All things seem possible in May.
Edwin Way Teale

Today's poems about trees

The first poem is by James Hayford.

Time to Plant Trees

Time to plant trees is when you're young
So you will have them to walk among -

So, aging, you can walk in shade
That you and time together made.


The second comes from a beloved book, Animal Instincts by Alan Titchmarsh. In the book, these words are said at a burial, and there are quotes around them. I don't know if they are the author's words or if someone else wrote them. I've done some searching but to no avail.

He leaves no mark, the man on earth,
To cause rejoicing at his birth,
Unless that mark be growing still
When he is laid 'neath yonder hill.
If at his death they cannot see
The branches of a sky-bound tree,
Whose roots he laid in leafy soil
When but a sapling, then his toil
Will count for nought in hill and dale
And vivid memory fade to pale.
But were that life to nature giv'n
Then man on earth createth heav'n
And heaven liveth evermore
Upon the tide-washed leafy shore.

The Presidents

Around here, we use the word 'peak-bagging' to describe climbing the many mountains. It occurs to me, not a climber, but a reader, that I am 'president-bagging.' When I was a girl, I read a lot about the Kennedys. And later, I read the first in the Lyndon Baines Johnson trilogy. But since then, I haven't read much until we saw a PBS program on Theodore Roosevelt, and this began an interest in the man which resulted in becoming a member of the Theodore Roosevelt Association. I've since read many books about him, and one by him, A Bully Father - his letters to his children. Thankfully, there are still many I haven't read. Last year I read No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin (who is working on a TR biography - hooray!) about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt; and John Adams by David McCullough. This week I finished listening to Truman, also by McCullough (37 tapes!). And I am just awed and wowed by all these books. I find them more interesting than just about anything else I've read. Today I'll begin His Excellency George Washington. Having read 1776 recently, I just had to read more about Washington. On deck is General Ike, written by his son, and then I want to read the Perret book on Eisenhower. There are a couple on Andrew Jackson I'm looking forward to, as well. I also want to read Goodwin's Team of Rivals. And on it goes.

It is so, so easy to criticize the Presidents, and even easier to limit them to one or two things we may know of them. But when I read these long, in-depth biographies, I learn about them as people with the complexities, faults, and gifts we all have. I have come away from each book with huge respect for the men, and indeed the women, their wives whom I'm also learning about. I've read Margaret Truman's (the President's daughter) book called First Ladies, Cokie Roberts' Founding Mothers, and I can't wait to read her new one, Ladies of Liberty.

Helene Hanff wrote that she could never "get interested in things that didn't happen to people who never lived." And though I do enjoy fiction, these biographies are my bread, the staff of my reading life.

Today's cd/These Streets

Paolo Nutini
These Streets
2006

What a wonderful album this is. Paolo Nutini is such a good writer and singer. I hear hints of Simply Red, and going back further, a little Marvin Gaye. He is very soulful in his music and words. Sometimes in a song a phrase will jump out at me and I'll think, how perfect. He is asking a woman to grant him a last request (before she leaves) and he says,

don't shrug your shoulders

I like that. It is just right. It is exactly what a disinterested, already-out-the-door person would do. 'Oh, okay, but then I'm gone' sort of gesture.

He sings of love, and those "New Shoes", and about leaving home.

cross the border, into the big bad world
where it takes you 'bout an hour just to cross the road

these streets have too many names for me
I'm used to Glenfield Road and spending my time down in Orchy
I'll get used to this eventually I know, I know

I like the way he personalizes a common experience. Most of us have been through it. Some stay on "those streets" and others come back home. When we are young, we just live through the days, unthinking, unknowing that change is coming. Then it hits us in our early twenties:

where'd days go when all we did was play
and the stress we were under wasn't stress at all

The insert has a photo of his late grandparents, and beside it are the lyrics to "Autumn."

I can hear you saying
my little fish don't cry, my little fish don't cry

Again, he puts in a personal phrase like that, a loving name, which brings it right home to all of us who have lost those in an older generation.

The songs are pensive, bouncy, humorous, deep. I just love this album and can't recommend it highly enough. You may learn more about this young man, and listen to some songs, here and here.