Magnolias and Bees

The Toledo Botanic Gardens are lovely any time of year. After a long winter they are particularly welcoming as the daffodils turn their dazzled faces into sunny skies. Magnolia blossoms open on breezy days with clouds scudding ahead of promised rain. My photo records such a day. The poem emerged when I later spotted the enterprising bee doing what bees do after months of waiting. (I had to enhance him a bit in 'Paint' :0)

Watching 1940s Movies

Film Noirs have gravity,
so we hold ourselves at some remove.
Hepburn and Tracy inspire awe.
They are Mount Rushmore titans who
permit our voyeur's pleasure at arm's length.

But the light-hearted musical
invites you in and says
that nothing's really changed. Relax.
So you drop your guard and smile along
with the smooth skin and agile moves
of Ann Miller and Lucille Ball.

Then, a silly thing - Frances Langford singing
about a cakewalk dance,
her shoulders gently wagging
to the melody . . .

Her confident smile is sweet
and timeless like your mother's voice
calling from the back stoop,
to come in and wash for supper.
It reminds you of her graduation picture.

Langford's delicate waist,
clasped in a bracelet of belt,
recalls a sixty-year old photograph
taken outside Blessing, Texas
by a smitten GI newly-wed.

Mother poses smiling
in the bright morning sun.
Her first anniversary still months ahead,
she is three months pregnant and casting
a sliver of shadow
as vibrant and new and tiny-waisted as she.

Ahhhhh . . . . . More Spring

Bloodroot opening for its brief bloom. The petals are so delicately attached that a soaking rain, too much breeze or warmth and theylie beneath the palm-shaped leaves like preened goose down. Addendum: 4/16/06 - Ah! After they're pollinated they lose their petals.



Chiondoxia tumbling over weathered railroad ties.

More Spring!

I heard my first backyard Northern Flicker today. For his "wik-a-wik-a-wik-a" scroll down.The sun shone splendidly on the frontyard daffodils. Energy levels are up, but ablitiy to focus on mundane necessities - way down. Ah, spring fever, at last.

Mischief In The Spring Garden

The Garden Fairy missed this time, but now the squirrel is wary and keeps an eye out for sneak attacks . Perhaps the fairies didn't want Mr. Squirrel to tip my niece's flower pot onto their picnic lunch. We humans can't see the Giggle Jam sandwiches.

Right in My Own Front Yard

"Today is the day when daffodils bloom . . . . . "
I posted earlier in the day bemoaning the lack of spring eye-candy in my back yard. Guess what was happening beside the front door step as the sun chased the last day of March into April. My daffodils opened above last year's oak leaves. Pretty blue Chiondoxia smiles into the breeze. Glory of the Snow - sweet harbinger of spring. Click here for Daffodil Celebration!

COMING UP CLOVER

Blogs from around the world are noting spring's arrival. Latitudinally-lower luckies! Northwest Ohio is sloooowly thawing and seems a little reluctant to doff it's winter undies. True, the possum is nesting under the shed - you can see the divot created by her comings and goings. The robin is singing sweetly, the Carolina Wren is in full rollicking voice, but there's very little for the eyes. To compensate, I've festooned windows and tables with ceramic hope and tinfoil prayer. You'll note looking past the windsock-bunnies gamboling in the 'save-the-birds-from-the-window' clover, that there's very little spring in my oak woods. Then feast your eyes on my little niece Katie and you'll see that spring is sprung just a little further south :0)

The Sonoran Desert Museum

Yikes! Click HERE to see the Ornate Tree Lizard

Unidentified lovely

Cactus Wren click - Here! Gambel's Quail - Here!

View of dust devils from Gates Pass - Tuscon, Arizona

Mojave Rattlesnake

It's all about survival - so apparent here at the Sonoran Desert Museum - more evident than any place I've ever been. The drought has severly stressed the environment and the birds are not laying eggs this spring and there are no baby rabbits. Still, life persists in all its amazing, lovely and fearsome forms.

Mission Xavier Del Bac

The Jesuit who founded this Catholic mission in southeastern Arizona was an Italian born on August 10, 1645. Eusebio Francisco Kino was an accomplished mathematician and astronomer as well as a man of faith. He had wanted to go to the orient, but was sent instead to Mexico from where he traveled extensively in his quest to save souls.

Tuscon, Arizon

A perfect dust print of the sole of my sandals on the rental car's dashboard is my only souvenir from the Spanish mission of San Xavier del Bac. That and the reflections on faith as we watched the queues of people slowly filing past the figure of St. Francis of Assisi - patting its head , some even lifting it stiffly from its pillow. A weathered lady and her companion from the Yukon explained to me that Lenten piety brought the Indians in such large numbers on this hot Sunday afternoon. Tourism and devotion don't mix. 'Voyeur' doesn't begin to cover the range of thoughts and feelings as I sat for a few moments on a well-worn pew watching the supplicants waiting patiently to leave a photograph or make the sign of the cross at the shrine in the alcove beside the elaborately carved sanctuary.
My husband taught me how create an oil painting out of photos in ACDSee, so I've tweaked every photo I took at the Mission into a great masterpiece.I told him he's created a monster.

Feeding The Livestock

Feeding The Livestock
by Cathy Wilson


Dark little eyes
see me coming out the door
banging scoops and cans.

I hear the clomping of feathers
as I watch being watched
coming through the gate.

Dust motes fly
as they jockey for a perch
and sidel along the fence
where they whiney for more seed.

Some feign indifference
while they shuffle little hooves -
twiggy as leaf stems,
in the overhead corral.

I think they'd like to nuzzle
and bump against my hand,
for they know I'm returning,
as any rancher might,

with something good in my pocket
tucked out of sight.

YUMMY!

I tossed some bread at the foot of a tree
Who then by stealth threw it back at me!
(Truly! For proof please read the previous post and CLICK on the right hand picture for the "end of the tail":0D

Bonk!

Undaunted by cautionary statements of neighbors, I continue to buy old loaves of whole-grain bread from the local bakery. They're concerned that my feeding the wild critters could create trouble. It's hopeless. The sun goes down and I'm rustling around in the freezer. It's been an open winter, but at times, a bitterly cold one. From my back porch I watch the woodland critters emerging from under sheds and shrub piles. How to explain the guilty, teary rush I get when watching them sniff the air while scrambling, waddling or creeping to my frozen substitute for the farmer's fields? To watch their twiggy, furred or naked pink fingers lift the morsel into their lives is, well - all I need of happiness at that moment. This morning, though, as I stood outside broadcasting scoops of seed to the daytime diners, a chunk of frozen bread dropped from the sky, missing my glasses by a few inches. A squirrel had lost his grip on a slice of rock-hard bread, high in the oak tree. When it thudded to the ground at my feet, it occurred to me that the old wisdom about casting your bread upon the waters could be more than a lovely metaphor. Perhaps I've discovered a hybrid of the 'Cast your bread . .' exhortation and the folk wisdom cautioning that 'The path to hell is paved with good intentions . . . ' Still, a beaning with a frozen slice of bread is a small price for the heaven of peeking at the mystery around us. It's as close as the tool shed or the crack in the sidewalk where the abundant universe of the ant begins and ends.

Expressing 'Being'

In the WSJ this morning, Stuart Isacoff wrote the following:

Philosopher Martin Buber said of art in his masterpiece, 'I and Thou' , that the creation of great art involves both a sacrifice and a risk. The sacrifice is the endless possiblility offered up on the altar of form: Like a prophet the artist labors to bring down to earth the beauty of the eternal, unseen worlds. The risk arises because true artistic expression must be uttered by the whole self, with no protective buffer against the world.

Do you know any of these courageous folk? It is to be sincerely hoped. I've encountered a few. Precious, indeed.

15 Years Later - The Old Stump and Friend

After 15 years I found the mangrove stump.
Through the magic of Paint the anhinga
is reunited with its old perch.

Snowy Affection

Here's a little whimsy as I sit on my cozy back porch surveying winter's loosening grasp. Perhaps in another month or so the idea of snowmen will seem a quaint memory. (I hope!)
I created the smooching snowpeople on the wonderful website, Snowdays.
(I did fill in weak spots on the original with my little felt-tip pen. I'm not perfect!:)

Nighttime Visitors

Can you see the Dancing Ladies - perhaps holding candles to brighten a crisp winter's evening?
No need to explain the Critter Flake. A fresh dusting of snow is like an old-fashioned negative that captures the warmth of nighttime visitors and on exposure to daylight reveals to us that others toil as industriously under the moon as we do under the sun.

Icy Hostility?

A few more snowflakes that I created on Snowdays: Rainy day Snowmen and Melting Snowmen. Hmmm. Do you think there is some buried hostility to icy cold hidden in these flakes?

Still Waiting . . . . . . .

I'ts gray today, but the tilt of
the lengthening days and a slight
sprig of hope in the titmouse's call,
keeps one's heart aloft.
Goodbye Mr. Snowman!
Hurry up. Spring!

Waiting

The Canada Goose who left this bit of feather behind for my wonderment last fall must be aware of the lengthening days. At the edge of some reawakening southern woodland or perhaps in a sunny park with mothers and babes in strollers, I hope he or she has a memory of the place where this whisp of warmth and flight remained behind. The wheel is turning and the arc of the sun is steadily climbing above the horizon where it lay diminished - except in the longing of the human heart .