Category Archives: Animals

Bottom of the Morning to You!

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mixed mediaSweet, blessed sleep! Yea verily, I got to sleep until the morning was almost gone today, and ohhhhh, how lovely it was indeed. Now this is vacation. A true holiday. Never mind the fun things we do, the glorious people we see, the magnificent scenery, it’s the sleep, Baby!

I don’t feel especially guilty about it, as you can tell. We once lived next door to a rooster, one of that breed who are supposed to be known as the royal emissaries of the dawn, but who deigned it his personal form of rule to choose when he would actually crow, preferably sometime in the early afternoon or perhaps around, no pun intended, the cocktail hour. I really admired him. I think that if I couldn’t choose when to be sleeping and when to be awake (even, astonishingly, productive at rare times) I would be a truly miserable character.

Instead, I get this great opportunity and I nab it gladly. I will go with my husband and complete an important business transaction with partners today; we’ll run errands, we’ll have dinner with longtime friends, we’ll come back to spend the night with my sister and her fur-bearing ‘family’. Seems like a useful enough day to me, especially if it culminates in a long night’s sleep before the next day. Hurray! Hurray!

Roaming amid the Riches

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photoDreamlike days wandering leisurely about in a favorite place . . . if there’s a heaven, it will have had stiff competition from certain days on earth. Yesterday here in San Francisco continued to be spectacularly sunny and full of the usual beloved scenery, friendly folk and delectable dining (more on that tomorrow). The air was filled with floral exuberance, food-stall enticements, salt tang from the waterfront, and the sounds of birds, humans and cable car bells all singing of happiness. Bicyclists jostled for space with meandering pram pushers, pedestrians, cars, buses, trolleys and hand-carts.photo

I forget, between times, what a vertical city SF is, not only in its hilly terrain but in the many buildings and monuments that spike up in a fountain-like spray of height and the tall trees all around and the masts of innumerable boats and ferries as one nears the waterfront. I think somehow this raises my spirits as well, a little like the developers of the High Gothic style’s vertical temples of pillars and points aimed at Heaven. Thanks to a Muni passport for occasional breaks from the walking, it’s still a magnificent city for traipsing around on foot for most of the day without flagging too badly. Being elated by the beauty all the livelong day, I am distracted from any such mundane concerns as it is.photo

And it’s nearing time to do just this again today, so I shall leave you with some more glimpses of our happy peregrinations.photo

Because I’m told that Sharing is a good thing.digital painting from a photo

Companionship or Conspiracy

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P&I + textP&I + textP&I + text

A Mockingbird Appears

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photoWhen ideas and inspiration have ceased, at least for the time being, to well up from the inside, it’s a mercy that the wide world contains so many and will hand them to me if I keep my senses ready enough. I often find myself too distracted by the busyness and pedestrian chores of the workaday world to see the magical other dimensions right within my reach, and need some helpful pricking from a sight or sound or scent as I pass through to remind me to open up the eye and ear and heart and take advantage of the universe’s generosity when it’s poured out so liberally right within my grasp.photoI walk in a haze of dully daily thought, lost to the world of rich and rare delights I’m walking in, when suddenly a mockingbird appears and turns its bright eye on me and seems to contemplate how absent I must be to almost pass it by when it’s quite nearly underfoot. In that shining eye a world reflects in which the other me is wrapped around with blooms, with drifting clouds sailing across a broad blue sky; with jasmine-scented breeze, with mist as the sprinklers spring to life, with happy shouts from a handful of little playing school kids passing me, looking for miracles of their own everywhere because they are yet too young to have forgotten them so foolishly as I have done. When the bird takes to its stripe-blazed wings and dives back into the air, my thoughts begin to follow and fly with it again: I am awake once more to flight and tune in to the rippling, rolling variations of its song as it rises to the trees, and soars above, and makes me remember that I am in a world full of wonder, if I will only let it fill me again.graphite drawing

Gleaming Afternoon

While I would soar, would gladly fly

Wide, in an arc across the sky

Whose dome of hotly burnished brass

Encompasses at every pass

The great wild height of atmosphere

That would engage to hold me here,

I can, eyes shut and spirit wide,

Pierce heaven to the great Outside.

Rodents on the Run

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graphite drawing + textgraphite drawing

How does My Garden Grow!

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Mornings are glorious, oh yes: last year’s blue morning glories in their full blazing beauty (center, with the infamous garden chandelier needing better candle power to compete with the blue brightness) inspired the planting of not only the blue variety again this year but also these hot beauties flanking it . . .

My friends, Texas gardening is a ceaseless adventure. I sense that Round One of the growth season has already closed and Round Two is beginning. The first batches of blooming goodies have quickly baked to dainty crisps and their leafy greenness gotten rather scrawny and lean looking. Yes, my darlings, it’s gettin’ hot around here.

The pavement and patio concrete have a certain handily dense solar mass that lends itself to emitting mirage-like rays of shimmering hottitude that fry up whatever seems to have escaped the downward dash of the sunlight as it fell burning from the sky in the first place. Hand watering with a hose, even in the cooler parts of the day, is an exercise in futility to a certain extent–you can practically see the spray evaporating as it comes out of the nozzle, and anything with full sun exposure makes me wonder if the roots of the plant in question will in fact be boiled in the water I’m trying to give it. Gives me a different perspective on the old saying about ‘killing with kindness’, to be sure.

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While the planters are already past their first peak (in the left-hand shot taken during the roses’ first heyday), more blossoms are coming in readily; the blue-black ornamental sage next to the bell in the center photo are already a big favorite with hummingbirds–you can just see the white blurred silhouette of one in the lower right quadrant of the picture–and the brilliant blue of borage is in full swing . . .

The first burst of the rose blooms has passed and the buds are in place for their second coming after a couple of weeks of being pruned back and nurtured through their little rest period. The boxed herbs and vegetables are very thirsty and rather root-bound, so I shall have to ease their pain by some gentle dividing and see if they can continue to show their heroism in beating the heat. Even in their potted distress, the borage plants are putting out large trusses of those glorious blue, refreshing-flavored starry flowers, so I will hope all the more that a little judicious division or removal to allow them a little loosening of their too-tight pants will make them happy rather than prove an additional challenge.

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Zinnias make fun little hideaway homes for local bug-dom, but katydids seem to prefer something with more windows, and the dragonfly always goes straight for the penthouse so he can survey all of the lesser insects down below . . .

I know that the garden creatures are happy. Besides having me to chew on, the insects have all sorts of plants, not least of all those greens that are heat-stressed and have their defenses down. Some of the little bugs are still shy, like the one just barely peering out of the peachy zinnia above. Most of them are quite happy to be a bit more brazen, though. My little green friend came to the window and hung out with me the other night quite willingly–or was it just staring and spying on me? The prize for showiness this week goes, though, to the handsome Carmine Darter (correct me if I mis-identify) dragonfly that calmly came and posed on my little homemade tomato cage so long that I could come out of the house and get up close and macro-personal with him.

Whatever else happens in my little playground here, the main development will likely be somewhat delayed by the depredations of my intended full-yard rehab and my entirely predictably inevitable mistakes and faux pas. And, of course, getting overheated. For the time being, I am enjoying the begonias, the silverbeet, the sweet potato vine, and the cyclamen; the marigolds, the basil, and the blue sage.

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For now, all is color and joy . . . and there is undoubtedly much more to come . . .

Natural Cycles & Unnatural

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For my arachnophobic friends out there: hurry past the first illustration–I think spiders are pretty, but I understand that you do not!

digital photocollageShort Term Shelter

Under the porches of the house,

amid the floor joists, posts and beams,

cobwebs and dust, dead mice and dreams,

there is a corner one last mouse

still nests in, where a little light

leaks underneath the latticed edge

that skirts the porches, where the hedge

holds lots of insects that by night

fill up his little rodent sides

and round his belly with their crunch;

this nest of his, I have a hunch,

will soon not be where he resides,

because, although he’s now grown fat,

it’s been discovered by the cat.

digital photocollageRides Upward & Back

Bicycling up into a tree, I paused to see what I could see

between the branches, richly leaved, and saw, if I was not deceived,

a broad, expansive view indeed, and haply so, while I was treed–

but (Woe!) relaxed my braking foot and clocked my forehead on the root–

so, shorter ’twas than was my wont, this little arbor-biking jaunt.

Like Ice Cream on a Blistering Day

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digital collageIf I’ve learned anything in moving from the Pacific Northwest to Texas, it’s how to handle a wider range of temperatures than I was accustomed to experiencing on a regular basis. Part of that is thanks, I suspect, to a gradual cyclic change of the climate in general, and that was helpful in its way: the extremes at both ends of the weather spectrum had gotten slightly extended outward before I left western Washington, so while it was nowhere near as common to have three-digit Fahrenheit temperatures (around 38C) as it is here in my newer home, it came closer more often. And I can certainly credit a combination of my own tendency to freeze exceedingly easily, even to the point of having a nervelessly cold nose, during much of the year with the counterbalance of that delightful boon of aging, a personal microwave having been activated in my torso at various intervals from my arrival at a Certain Age and forward.photo

Then there was this relocation to Texas and the discovery that even a freezy-bones like me can learn to love air conditioning in the good old summertime, and conversely, that it really doesn’t have to be snowy, icy or even a notably low temperature to feel bitterly cold in the winter if the wind is howling through town sharply enough at the moment.

So what I’m working on is a sort of low-rent version of biofeedback: learning to think my way toward hot-and-cold happiness. Not hugely successfully, thus far, mind you–this is very much a work in progress. But I’m trying to convince myself that if other people can find the blast of the cold air returns in cafes and grocery aisles pleasant and comfortable, surely the temperature can’t be untenable for me. That if they can like sipping screamingly hot coffee or soup on a cool day and not develop third-degree burns, I should be able to warm up my refrigerated self in wintertime without having to set my socks on fire.photo

Now that it’s May and has passed 90F/32C at a hasty trot, I do need to get the whole plot in gear. While my brain is not necessarily already operating at top speed in gathering the necessary data to combat the actual, and already pretty nearly oppressive, heat, maybe if I dig deep into my treasury of imagination and do my best to imagine myself cooling off, there just may be hope yet.photo

Magical Night & Mystic Day

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photoEnchantments

One night I stood upon the green

And every nightingale a-wing

Stopped in the linden trees to sing,

A perfect choir though all unseen,

Encircling in the meadow’s crown—

Night-blooming flowers ‘round my feet

Reflected moonglow, and their sweet,

Sweet breath rose up as stars fell down

In meteor showers to earth because

Its beauty was so great, so dear,

They longed to draw the night sky near

To all this peacefulness that was—

And while I stood upon that lawn,

Aching with joy, with ecstasy

As sharp as ice and flame in me,

I woke full wide, and it was dawn.photo

The day that came up in that place

Made all the green-wood hum and quake

With quivering for pleasure’s sake,

At seeing the full sun’s clear face,

Yet, basking in the softest fall

Of constant rain, as mist, to fly

In colored arcs across the sky

And shower prisms on us all—

The birds of day joined in that hymn

And coaxed the foxes to the green,

Contented beasts not often seen

In sun, and as I stood, a slim

Grey foal came, too, and nine or ten

Of rabbits, and the beasts all danced,

And I stood still, transfixed—entranced—

And blinked my eyes, and it was night.digitally painted photo

Another Pastorale

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Yesterday after running errands, we were reluctant to head directly home and do serious Work on a sunny Saturday afternoon, so first we took a couple of brief driving detours into the surrounding ranch-lands and enjoyed a uniquely lush and verdant north Texas spring outing, luxuriating in the marvels of denser woodlands, fuller runoff creeks and richer grasslands than we’ve yet seen since moving down here. Needless to say, we are reveling in the wealth of meadow and pastureland in the surrounding counties, as are all of the horse and cattle herds that didn’t get sold off or butchered outright to evade starvation and thirst in last year’s drought. It’s a beautiful prospect, this well-watered magic we have right now, and inspires the poetic in one’s spirit no matter how it defies other work.mixed media + text

Spring Pastures

Far back among the rolling hills, Where prairie grasses sweep and bow

And the sweet wildflower spills Pour down the slope, the Angus cow

Set farthest back along the line Draws up her calf to join the herd,

Slow-swaying, toward a stand of pine; The rancher there, without a word,

Appears to bring an evening feed, And all the cattle on the clock

That balances content with need, Some time before, began this walk . . .

The faintest glint of sidelong rays Begins to tint the brush with gold

The way late Spring colors her days, As if instead of growing old

She’s only burnishing her tone The more to show her graciousness,

Inviting birds that fly alone To join a choir whose notes confess

A radiant love of living things, Of all that’s sweet and warm and new,

Of leggy calves, of seed that brings That grass now banking up the slough . . .

The cattle walk, now, in their line, Their black flanks shaded in the dusk

With blue-tinged shadows, as a fine Light scent arises like a musk

From all their footsteps tapped in clay, Veils of the thinnest dust laid low

Between the sorghum rows’ array And that tall hayfield yet to mow,

And not one calf among them all Drifts off the center of the trail,

Because they sense their supper-call As sure as seasons never fail . . .