Friday, April 30, 2010

Lucky, lucky, lucky . . .

(morel mushrooms/heaven-on-earth)



Interrupted Fern


Sprouting Grass Moon(aka Full Pink Moon)






. . .Lucky to be gathering spring delights with all our senses.

The experience of long winter nights makes it all the lovelier.

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Sunday, April 25, 2010

Just Gold and Flickers . .




Let's take a closer look . .


She's sweet . .(no mustache)




And now for some Flicker gold . . . (don't often get a shot like this!)





Gold!


You know, but just in case: Yellow-shafted Flicker


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Thursday, April 22, 2010

Toad Soup





The American toad is celebrating spring in the pond at TBC. Busy trying to capture toad anatomy, I almost missed the picture of another spring phenomenon - a youngster's curiosity. I later learned this young man's name - Ivan. I suppose the toad was afraid he might get 'terrible' treatment, but they parted company as friends. Ivan clambored back into spring exploration and the toad hopped back into a soup of trilling DNA.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

April 2006 Who? Me?! (Four Years Later)



Here's what I posted four years ago this month:


I almost deleted the message on the answering machine as I didn't recognize the caller's name at the beginning of the call. Incredulity followed as someone from the Heritage House Museum in Key West, Florida informed me that my poem, "Pruning", was being awarded 3rd prize in the 2006 Robert Frost Poetry Contest. Please indulge my public exaltation. For this small-town kid, one of seven children and a lackluster student - this is a rather big day.

And so . .

. . here we are four years later and I'd like to report (but can't) that I've written more award winning poetry and the great American novel.

I'm afraid I'm quite content to rest on my laurels (given no choice ;0) .

So for the next several days I'll be preening contentedly - remembering that brief moment of exhilaration and trying not to remember my way-too-vainglorious response. Only human, folks. Flawed and human - the awareness of which - inspired this (ahem) award-winning poem:

Pruning


Pruning is such a delicate matter
as we choose what must relinquish the right
to remain aloft and cling to the ladder
of the arbor where the squabbling jays natter
about their perches for the night.

It’s the space you cleave between the branch
and the trellised bark - you know will bleed.
You watch your questioning knuckles blanch
with the hope you’ve measured beyond mere chance
as required by the gardener’s creed
in the dog-eared books which try to say
about the choices a man must make
as to what must go and what may stay,
to love the light for another day.

The pruner knows his hands’ mistake
will leave the roots beneath his job
making their peace with the fool in the air,
judging his work while his temples throb,
as he stifles regret, with a tight-throated sob,
over the error for the things in his care.




Catherine Wilson 2006

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Sunday, April 11, 2010

You Turkeys . . .


. . . are so cute!











We've never seen this before. Or heard it so close to home. The male turkey is smitten and follows her everywhere with his worrisome pleading. Gobblegobblegobble on and on - into the night as he follows her across hill and dale and across our porch.

These are wild. Apparently a hybrid between domestic and wild turkey. They're a hoot. Or should I say - a gobble.

My video of Courting Turkeys:

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Thursday, April 08, 2010

EEEK!! (OR) . . . .


. .things that showed up on my external hard drive after my computer crashed.

I now use Carbonite, but I have thanked my hubby and son a gazzillion times for instructing me on backing up my files.

I feared I'd lost this dear little bold jumping spider. He's baaaaacck ;-)




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Monday, April 05, 2010

Drifting . . .



Ahhhh . . . much better now. It's good to drift away from those rather dark reflections in "Orphaned Blog."

Ahhhhh . . . this is much better.

Hope you're all drifting along smoothly with the spring intoxication.



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Spring Air


Took this yesterday. It's the same tree as I used for my poem years ago.



I still love this little ditty. No profundity here . . just plain unbridled delight.


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Saturday, April 03, 2010

Orphaned Blog. The Comment I Didn't Leave



Update II: Tammy is alive. She left a comment on Pam's blog. I know her heart is breaking. She had traveled to be with Pam a couple years ago. They referred to themselves as Batman and Robin.

UPDATE I
I am shaken. My fellow blogger Anvil Cloud left a note to check on Pam's blog. It seems she died mere hours after I posted this piece late on the evening of April 3rd. That evening I had felt compelled to express a feeling that her blog had been orphaned. So after more than a year . ..

This is what I found tonight:


Tuesday, April 06, 2010
In Loving Memory
Pam Antonivich
8/10/1942- 4/4/2010
"I have ALS, it does not have me
Art does."
-Pam 2009-
She was a very brave woman
Who will be greatly missed
And was loved by many

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Here is the post I wrote as Pam was very near death:

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Gentle reader. Your life is in throttle-up mode today as spring is pumping energy and life into your routine. This post is an autumn plaint, not a vernal paean to love, but I wonder if you will find it relevant to your involvement in this community we create in cyberspace.
Last night I almost left this comment in Pam's blog, "Mind Trips." Almost. I'm certain she is dead. Almost certain. And it is that uncertainty which I address below:

The following is the comment I didn't leave. What if somehow Pam still accesses her blog and found my dark ponderings. Unthinkable. So this is a comment that will never be posted.
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Perhaps this isn't the place for expressing the thoughts that I'm having this evening, but it's been more than a year since we've heard from Pam and six months since her friend Tammy has posted. Both suffered from ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease, and knowing what I know from a family experience with ALS, my sad conclusion is that they are gone.

We are enlarged by the exchanges with others we've met through blogging. We lean over one another's cyber shoulder and give encouragement and praise and share our wonder and amusement about the journey through this challenging life and fascinating universe.

We celebrate, laugh, strut, worry and rant. We share a little of our unique corner of the world with people whose welcoming porches become as familiar and comfortable as a neighbor's, maybe more so given the anonymity of some communities today.

So perhaps someone will come up with a phrase or word to describe the feeling of returning to a blog like Pam's - her strong personality, her courage, her talent, her portraits of her family, the stories about her friends and baby kitten - as fresh as the day she hit the word 'publish' for the last time - and find her missing.

What words to describe the feeling that we've entered a home where everything is in order, but eerily vacant? The lights still glow, the pictures smile from the walls, the coffee pot is warm, but the owner has left. No note is on the counter, the door is still ajar, the birds come to the feeders, but no one is home.

So we return occasionally to peer in the windows for signs of life. We turn away, but pause to slip a note under the door mat with a scribbled hug and our email address, hoping a house-sitter will find it and allay our worry or confirm our suspicions.

The pixels shine as brightly. Pam's slideshow spins in the sidebar. One of my photos is captured there in the amazing art she created on her computer.

Tammy's picture shines from the comment queue above the keyboard where I drop these words into a blank space. I'm aware of her eyes as I scatter letters across the screen. It's as though she is watching.

The sad fact of this unaddressed flaw of the internet community is revealed in instances like Pam's, where we are left with no closure - only the pitiable, haunting flicker of her orphaned blog.

There are no customs to manage this grief. No one to address our consternation as to why the family has not put a mourning wreath on the door, left instructions as to where sympathy notes might be sent or merely typed one line stating the date of her passing.

I have a friend whose mother died three years ago. Recently she told me that she's left her clothes hanging in the closet just as her mother left them in the vacant little house outside of town.

Too painful to face. Too painful to empty the closet and walk away, or in Pam's family's case, too painful to enter this blog house where Pam still smiles amid her hopes and dreams.

Is it our business? Do we have a right to bristle with frustration at the void, at the unanswered questions? My answer is yes.

Because, finally, we did care. Through this imperfect medium, in this imperfect world, we reached across the physical boundaries of our short lives and hers and created a neighborhood of the heart.
She was one of us.

She was our friend with ALS, the disease that I never told her took my father in nine short months. We cheered her on as her life was extended with drugs, therapy, and loving care-takers, though we knew as surely as she did, that her courage could only sustain her warrior's heart a while longer.

With her unacknowledged passing, one of the homes on the block has been abandoned. The lights come on at night. The dog still sits by door. But no one's home.

The weeds will never grow here. The paint will never chip.

And there is the heavy irony in the title of Pam's last post:

"Still Standing."

What new turn of phrase can address this new phenomenon of the orphaned blog?

Perhaps the question is the answer.

On this spring day, I'm giving my family instructions as to how to manage my "Looking Up" when I die or become unable to care for my little house on the cyber neighborhood block.

Better yet, like a pre-planned funeral, perhaps we should write our own sign-off that some survivor could merely find in the draft drawer and put it out there, beneath the welcome mat, so that visitors could leave a little note in the mail box, gently pat the newel post, and walk away without feeling a uneasy sense that they've abandoned an old friend that just couldn't get to the door.

Rest in peace my friend, my lost neighbor.

Love,

Cathy Wilson

April 3, 2010
mushduckATyahooDOTcom

Friday, April 02, 2010

Into The Spring Woods . . .

With Jonna and Hudson the terrier.

We weren't alone. Mr.Snapping Turtle didn't budge.

The eyes said it all . . .







" I'm tired of cold mud.

This light, this moss,

this log, this frog song are mine.

Move along."

We did.



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