Friday poetry challenge: It takes a village (idiot)

So I'm driving home from Aldi where I've witnessed three random acts of kindness in a single shopping trip and I'm filled with a warm sense of appreciation for the community of Aldi shoppers, and I'm on a stretch of twisty country road that runs past a property formerly owned by a con man who tried to bilk our community out of piles of money through a complex scheme thwarted by a few random locals with the courage to open their mouths--so yes, I'm feeling good about the power of ordinary people to keep their community safe and happy, when suddenly there's this kid riding a scooter in the road right in front of my car.

I'm not talking about a Vespa; I'm talking about a glorified skateboard with handlebars, a flimsy thing that this kid, who looks to be about 12 years old, is zipping and weaving and swerving around on right in the middle of my lane with no helmet or knee pads or any other kind of protection. I come around a curve and there he is, but he must have heard me coming because he quickly swerves into the other lane to get out of my way. Right: he's riding a foot-powered vehicle that clearly isn't roadworthy straight into oncoming traffic--if there's anything coming around the next curve, he's toast. Why not steer his scooter to a safer place, like, for instance, off the road?

I barely have time to think all this before I'm past him and rounding the next curve and relieved to see that no cars are coming, and I look in the rear-view mirror to see that Scooter Boy has swerved back into my lane, which is the right lane for motorized vehicles but not for helmetless boys on scooters. Someone needs to teach that kid a lesson, I tell myself, and suddenly I hear my dad yelling at a bike-rider who crossed (in a crosswalk! in a school zone!) in front of his car: It'd serve you right if someone ran you over! 

And I don't want to be the cranky old person who yells at random strangers, but I also don't want to be the benevolent old person who drives blithely around a blind curve and flattens a kid on a scooter. I can see why that stretch of road would be appealing to a scooter-rider, with all the curves and hills offering opportunities for daredevil jumps and spins, but that one-mile stretch of road serves as a shortcut between the interstate and a busy highway. It gets traffic! Someone could get killed! Someone needs to teach that kid a lesson! But there's nowhere to pull over and even if I did, what would I say to the kid--and why would he listen to me?

So I drive on home, hoping that the kid has a mom or aunt or nosy neighbor nearby who will witness his shenanigans and give him a good talking-to. It takes a village to raise a child, but unless he's auditioning for the role of Village Idiot, he needs to get his scooter off the road. 

I'm tempted to leave him a note in the style of William Carlos Williams:

This is Just To Say

I have driven
my car
past your
scooter

which you
were probably
proud to be
riding so well

Forgive me
for not stopping
(you stopped
my heart cold)

Try yelling that message! Or better yet, trying putting some unsolicited advice into verse form for the benefit of various Village Idiots.

Mystery of the dying maple

It's a little disconcerting to park my car next to a maple tree in rapid decline. Last year about half of the limbs looked dead, but this year very few limbs have any leaves at all. 

Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Dig down in that part of the yard and you'll find a thick layer of gravel a few inches beneath the surface, and many things we've planted out there have failed to thrive. The maple was here before we moved in and looked okay for many years. A dogwood we planted seems to be thriving, but the Japanese maple nearby has a few leafless limbs. We've taken some dead limbs off the big maple but at some point the whole tree needs to come down.

Which is a shame because it's an ideal staging space for birds visiting our feeders. This morning I watched an adult red-bellied woodpecker grab a seed from the feeder and then fly back to feed a juvenile waiting in the tree. The dearth of foliage makes it easy to observe birds' social behavior: cardinals fighting for territory, male cowbirds putting on a courtship display for a female, and, this morning, two house finches having an encounter I couldn't quite interpret.

Taking out the sickly maple will provide more sunshine for the dogwood, but I'll miss that tree when it's gone. Is it a mistake to get so attached to particular trees? That maple seems like a permanent fixture of the landscape, but a tree that stands tall today may well start dropping limbs in the next windstorm.  

Just not on my car, okay? 

Cowbirds vying for the attention of a female.

Wish I knew what they were thinking.

Same tree, different branches.

Dead limb between two still living.

A model of sharing.

Friday poetry challenge: Mulling over mullein

Is it pathetic to admit that some days the thing I look forward to more than anything is a particular patch of weeds growing beside the highway on my drive home from work?

After a day involving too much administrative claptrap, a long but productive meeting, and an infuriating encounter with a person whose idea of an apology is "I'm sorry you feel that way," I was driving home wanting to punch someone when I passed a mullein patch and saw that the weeds had started blooming.

Elsewhere mullein may be a medicinal plant cultivated for its power to attract pollinators, but around here it's considered a weed that flourishes accidentally in sunny spots that the highway mowers can't reach. A volunteer promoting health, attracting pollinators, and providing beauty--what's not to love?

I know the spots along my commute where mullein grows best and I look forward to the blooms every summer, my eyes searching the shoulder for yellow when they ought to be fixed on the road. Yesterday my husband and I were on our way home when I pointed out a cluster of blooming mullein, maybe six or eight plants in all, and he said, "We've got more than that growing just uphill from the house."

Well I didn't know that because my bum knee has been resisting hilly walks, but it's feeling significantly better after a cortisone shot so when we got home I walked right up the hill to the spot in question. A few years ago we'd had a massive dying tree cut down there, a process that had obliterated the few mullein stalks growing nearby--temporarily. Bringing more sunshine into the area has resulted in a mullein boom--close to 20 stalks rising up and starting to bloom.

One definition of weed is a plant to which we say We'd prefer your absence, but I'm not complaining about a bumper crop of mullein bringing beauty into my back yard. They make me want to squeeze out some doggerel, but what rhymes with mullein?

I can't be sullen
around a mullein.

Its fuzzy leaves
are never dull. In

woods where there's
rarely a lull in

songs of birds,
where trees are fallen,

just uphill from
a creek that's swollen,

I can't be sullen
around a mullein.
  

So okay, it's weedy but at least I tried. Who else will give it a shot? 

From bird-watching to word-watching.

So how was your holiday, I asked, and my colleague shrugged. I missed the library, she said. I need to be here to write.

Writing during summer break? What a concept. Writing Wednesdays begin tomorrow but meanwhile I've been too distracted to do any serious writing. Time to construct a list of summer priorities! But that feels too much like work. Maybe tomorrow.

Today I'm holding on to the last vestiges of joy from my weekend with the grandkids. I'm recalling how they infuse every moment with energy, how they play the piano with verve and invent silly games and put together Lego blocks in unconventional ways. The youngest showed me how her colorful Lego shark could swallow a swimmer and poop him out the other end. When she and her brother couldn't recall the theme to Jaws, they hummed the Pink Panther theme instead. 

I loved taking the oldest grandkid to riding lessons and seeing that petite person take a great big horse through its paces with confidence and skill. Where did she get that? From her mother, no doubt. Big animals make me nervous.

But that didn't stop me from trying to visit some bison on the drive home. I'd read about the bison herd at the new visitor center at Jesse Owens State Park, which isn't really on the way to anywhere but I didn't mind taking the scenic route down twisty country roads. 

Finally I turned in at the sign pointing to the parking area. I had to haul my wonky knee up multiple flights of steps, through a steep green area that will one day be a pollinator habitat, up to the top of a hill where the Visitor Center sat, and the first thing I saw was another lot where I could have parked to avoid the many steps. 

Today my knee is absolutely screaming, but at least I got to see the place where the herd of bison would have been if they'd been out. We've had rain. The lower part of the bison habitat was flooded. The bison were locked safely away from the mess, so I just enjoyed the view. Saw some killdeer. Heard some orioles. Dashed down the steps as fast as I could to avoid the sudden rain.

On Sunday I'd had lunch with an old friend and stopped by the heron rookery in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, where an idling tourist bus made the place sound and smell like a busy factory floor. When the bus finally left, it was as if someone had opened a door to birdsong. Herons were feeding chicks in many of the nests, but thick foliage obscured the view. So imagine how delighted I was today to stop on the bridge at the end of my driveway and see a great blue heron standing in my own little creek.

Good to get away, nice to be home, but soon I'll need to switch from birdwatching to word-watching. Summer break is here--so it's time for summer writing. Tomorrow.

  

At the heron rookery

 

Yellow warbler looking sweet

Oriole

Tree swallow looking sassy

Friday poetry challenge: Plenty of nothing

You don't have to write good poetry, I tell myself. There's already more good poetry published than you'll ever get a chance to read. 

I'm giving myself a little pep talk: You're not doing this for a grade. There is literally nothing at stake except a promise that you made to yourself. You're not going to stand over the keyboard threatening to slap your own hand with a ruler if you can't produce a little Friday poetry.

But I've got no motivation, no inspiration, not the least thread of an idea worth wrapping words around. I survived four days of meetings this week, dealt gracefully with some unreasonable people, cooked some decent meals, paid some bills, read a book, and failed to find a glossy ibis.

The ibis, a rare visitor to this area, was reported by the local birding group. I read the ibis alert while sitting not eight feet from a photograph I took of a glossy ibis at a wetland in Florida, proof positive that I have seen glossy ibises in person, but if a glossy ibis makes a pit stop at a wetland within an hour's drive of my house, I can't help it: I want to go and see. 

But I couldn't go just then (rain) and then I had more meetings the next day, but yesterday--more than 36 hours after the ibis report--my longsuffering husband agreed to take us on an ibis hunt. Directions were incomplete and GPS was not helpful, but we found the pond, as advertised, right next to the Hallelujah Barn. 

Alas, no ibis. So maybe the high point of my week was going on a long drive in the countryside to see an absence of ibis.

Pond without ibis,

poem without thought,

day with no meetings--

hurrah for what's not.

(And that's all I've got.)

Okay, your turn: wrap some words around a big ol' wad of nothing.

(Hat tip to my adorable daughter, who told me that if I have nothing to write about, I should write about nothing.)

Finding beauty in a world of hurt

Yesterday in the midst of hanging around the hospital with my son, I kept remembering that it was both my oldest grandkid's 13th birthday and the tenth anniversary of my mother's death. This morning my prosthetic memory showed me adorable baby pictures but also reminded me that on the day after my mother died, I went to a park near her house and saw juvenile anhingas stretching their wings. Birds are good therapy, then and now, but I can't get away to Florida at the moment so I've been outside watching the ordinary birds that visit our yard.

I've been hearing brown thrashers calling but finally caught a glimpse of a handsome one today. And for the first time I saw male cowbirds performing their mating display, puffing up their chests and making that peculiar gurgling sound to attract the attention of a female that seemed profoundly unimpressed. Cardinals, woodpeckers, mourning doves, towhees, finches, sparrows, chickadees, titmice...is there anything more relaxing than sitting in the quiet morning sun while birds flit here and there? Just what I needed after the week I've endured.

A few Sundays ago while I was driving to church a red-tailed hawk slammed into my windshield with a sound as loud as a gunshot. I was so startled I nearly drove off the road. I checked my windshield for cracks and saw only a gooey smear but no other sign of the hawk. I can't imagine that it could have survived such a collision, which really upset me. I love hawks even though I know they often eat smaller birds. 

Anyone who pays attention knows that nature is not always a warm and cuddly place; the juvenile bird stretching its wings today may be a smear on a windshield tomorrow, and the cowbird mating display that amuses me today may result in eggs laid in other birds' nests so that the fledgling cowbirds can destroy the other chicks. Life and death are partners in the grand dance, but as they swirl there's time to celebrate a whole world of beauty.  

Juvenile anhinga

 

Towhee

Male cowbirds vying for the attention of a female.

Brown thrasher

Downy woodpecker

Chickadee

Tulip poplar,  blossoming

Mourning dove

Infused, transfused, and woobering away

I'm sitting in a waiting room at The James, stressed out after a bizarre and busy week and exhausted after driving two hours in the foggy morning to get my son to Columbus in time for chemotherapy, a blood transfusion, and a lumbar puncture, so I close my eyes and listen to the lively music someone is playing on the grand piano in the lobby. Lovely. But wait--is that the theme from MASH? A high-tech hospital resembles a MASH unit the way a calculator resembles an abacus, but beyond that, what sane person sitting at a piano in a cancer hospital full of patients undergoing excruciating and sometimes futile treatment thinks it's a great idea to play a song called "Suicide Is Painless"? 

The player is highly skilled but the selections are eclectic: the charming holiday tune "Some Children See Him" followed by "The Entertainer" and "Lord of the Dance." And "Suicide Is Painless." I take comfort in the assurance that a majority of the people listening aren't aware of the lyrics. 

My son is weathering his treatments well, starting with an infusion of Madagascar periwinkle (vincristine) in the early hours while I suck in an infusion of caffeine. How early do I have to get up to fulfill my early-morning trasnport duties? Fourish. Autocorrect thinks that should be nourish, which reminds me of the transfusion nurse who keeps trying to feed us and finally takes me to a locked room containing a refrigerator with a big sign on the door: Patient Nourishment Only. Uncrustables and ginger ale--sweet! I'm not a patient but I leave there well nourished.

In my purse is a book that ought to nourish my soul while I wait, but after the early start and the long drive, my eyes and brain are too fatigued to focus on the words. Instead I listen to the nurse's enthusiastic explanation of the need for a transfusion: red blood cells are like little delivery vehicles transporting oxygen and other essential elements all over the body, but chemo cripples the blood-cell-making equipment. What do you do when your car breaks down? You call an Uber! It's amusing to think of a fleet of tiny Ubers zooming into my son's blood vessels, but it's even funnier when the nurse keeps pronouncing it Woober. 

If retirement gets dull I suppose I can pursue a second career as a Woober driver, given my recent mastery of the art of driving long distances while barely awake. But the pay can't possibly be worth the hassles. I'll get up before the sun and drive to Columbus to help my flesh and blood battle lymphoma, but I'd be less motivated to transport people who aren't my son. I am not, after all, a red blood cell. I need to take time to nourish my own soul with poetry and nature and music.

Though maybe not "Suicide is Painless."

The day you deserve

Among the bumper stickers on the battered little car in front of me was one that said Have the Day you Deserve, and I'm not sure what more a person can ask for. 

Today, apparently, I deserve to drive along a tranquil river reflecting abundant sunshine, and I deserve to enjoy the rhododendrons and azaleas that make Marietta the prettiest little town on the planet this time of year, and I deserve to walk past fragrant lilacs and see the peonies just beginning to bloom on campus, and I deserve to nab the parking closest to my office--so close, in fact, that I can look out my office window and wave to my adorable little car, not that it would notice.

I parked next to the President's residence, which still shows signs of damage from the nasty hail-and-wind storm that battered Marietta last month. All over town I see fly-by-night hail-repair services popping up, and I hear about scam artists offering great deals on repairing roofs and windows. I don't know what my colleagues did to deserved pockmarked cars, leaky roofs, or broken glass panes in the greenhouse dangling overhead like the sword of Damocles. The storm was very localized and selective, smashing holes in siding and windows all over one side of a house but sparing the others. On one street I saw three houses in a row with big blue tarps over holes in the roofs, but the next street over has none.

I missed the big storm because I was in Columbus helping my son wend his way through chemotherapy and all the indignities of cancer treatment. Not sure what any of us did to deserve cancer, but that's not how it works, is it? If the book of Job tells us anything, it insists that rewards and punishments are not equitably distributed--that the rain falls on the just and the unjust. Or the hail, as the case may be.

What did we ever do to deserve cancer is just as ridiculous a question as What did we ever do to deserve peonies? Gratuitous suffering lives on the same block as gratuitous beauty. But I can't think about that this morning. Instead, I plan to accept the peonies as one small part of the day I deserve, even though I did absolutely nothing to earn it.

 

Lane change

I swung my car around a blind curve and caught sight of a new sign beside my road--One lane road ahead--but I barely had time to register the meaning before I came face-to-face with a pair of stout poles blocking my lane.

Good thing I don't take that curve at speed! Anyone swinging around there above about 20 mph is in for a rude awakening, doubly so if a car is coming the other way. Or a truck. Lots of trucks on my country road. 

There's no doubt that the road needs repair; we've seen slippage for years, but now that whole lane seems to be on the verge of sliding down into the creek. One of these days I'll come around the curve to find heavy equipment and construction workers shoring up the bank. A flagger might be a good idea, or at least a little advanced warning.

This spring we've seen more than our usual share of sudden shocks along the road, so it feels good to turn a corner and enter the reconstruction phase. My son's tumor keeps shrinking and he's even had a chance to drive his own car, which sat idle for the three weeks he was in the hospital. More chemo Friday, but so far he has tolerated the poisons pretty well. I had to pivot to Zoom teaching with help from colleagues, but this week I've gone back to face-to-face teaching without a hitch except for the occasional odd feeling that I don't belong in the classroom. I've settled in back home, reclaimed my kitchen and cooking chores, and tackled piles of claptrap to get caught up on administrative tasks.

It's shocking how much simpler life can be when I'm in my usual place. Yesterday I arrived at campus and marveled over how easy it is to get to my office: park, lock, walk. Arriving at the hospital to see my son was a complex multi-stage process every stinking day: Drive into parking garage; stop to take ticket; wind around level after level to find an open space: walk to the pedestrian bridge; walk through the scanner at the security checkpoint; walk through again because something in my purse always makes the scanner beep; walk to the welcome desk; hand over the parking ticket for validation (so I can get out for $3 a day); hand over my driver's license; tell them my son's name and room number; spell his name at least twice before they can find it in the system; get my photo taken; slap the visitor's sticker on my shirt; put away my license and parking permit--and only then am I ready to get in the elevator and go upstairs.

Well, goodbye to all that--maybe not forever, but for now. Today if the weather holds up I may even make it to a college baseball game, my first in over a month. I've had my share of sudden stops and I'm ready for some easy driving.  

 

  

 

Comforts of home

After we'd left behind the vomiting and the city traffic, after we'd made the big turn toward the south into the hilly part of the state, my son sat up in the passenger's seat and said, "I'll bet we can get the Guardians' home opener on the radio."

And we did. I can't tell you how thrilled I was to be driving my son home from the hospital while listening to our baseball team on the radio, with the sun shining brightly and redbud blooming exuberantly in the surrounding woods.

At our bridge I stopped so we could listen to the creek and look up the hill at the trilliums blooming, and then we got to the house and found the resident he-man ready to haul all our stuff in from the car and then serve us lasagna and garlic bread, piping hot from the oven. And then to sleep in my own bed, rise to a pot of my favorite tea, and go for a walk amongst the spring blossoms--well, it's good to be home. I have a list as long as my arm of things I need to do before returning to campus Monday, but just for today let's just relish the comforts of home.

trillium!

Just a few trout lilies hiding amongst the ramps.

critter on a pawpaw bud

buckeye

fertile stalk of field horsetail

dutchman's breeches

a few remaining bloodroot blossoms

 

squirrel corn mingling with the dutchman's breeches

mayapple

redbud

Jammin'

My husband got home around dusk yesterday and said You've got to see this so I went out and had a look. It was definitely worth seeing: thick fog hanging above a creek so choked with ice that it bulged on the upstream side of our neighbor's low bridge,. The icejam caused ice chunks to pile up more than a quarter mile upstream past our bridge and sent water over the banks into the low parts of our meadow. The creek looked solid, but if you tried to walk on the jammed-in ice chunks you'd soon fall victim to gaps and instabilities. The ice chunks looked spooky in the fog but far scarier was the prospect of further flooding. If the ice and water can't move past the jam, there's nowhere for it to go except where it can do the most damage.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere but it's too hot to touch right now--or too cold to handle. 

 

 

Digressions toward upliftitudination

I'm standing at the gas station fueling up my salt-encrusted car, relieved that a sudden outbreak of warmth is melting the ice that keeps covering every stinking surface in the county, even the river, which was absolutely gorgeous this morning with that silvery sheen of icemelt shimmering over the frozen expanse--now where was I going with this?

Oh yes: pumping gas, grabbing a paper towel to wipe off the rear backing-up camera that keeps getting so thoroughly coated with layers of road salt and, now that the ice is melting off my driveway, mud, so filthy that when I back up the camera shows me only vague blotches where the road ought to be, when suddenly I see a big green truck. Meaning I see the truck in the gas station parking lot, not in my mud-covered driveway, which it (the truck) could never reach because even if a semi loaded with soda could cross my bridge without causing a collapse it would probably jackknife on the sharp turn just past the bridge and never make it up the mud-covered hill, which is a good thing because there's no room up there for a semi to turn around so it would be stuck there forever, in my driveway, a big green semi advertising 7UP--and again, I've lost my train of thought.  

I blame the weather, which started the week in single digits, made a brief visit into the low 60s, and now hovers in the 30s, leading to a freeze-melt-refreeze cycle that's driving us all just a little bit crazy, not to mention that the weather inside my building is so miserable that on Monday I had to sit in my office with my coat on even while wearing long-johns and two layers of sweaters.

But I digress. (So does the weather. Repeatedly.) I'm pumping gas when I see this truck, this huge green semi sporting a massive ad for 7UP, a beverage I literally never drink unless I'm at a baby shower or some such celebration where someone makes that super-sweet punch involving 7UP poured over sherbet, and I'm not sure why else 7UP exists except to make that punch, when suddenly (back at the gas station, pumping gas) I notice the words on the side of the big green truck: Be UPtimistic.

And this makes me smile.

Yes: despite the weather, despite the ice that keeps trying to kill me and the mud that makes my car slide all over the driveway, despite all the ways my department and my discipline and, yes, even my entire career are being marginalized and misunderstood and muddled, despite the lack of answers about health problems plaguing my loved ones and lack of certainty about funding for just about everything and the difficulty of getting that one annoying student to understand that the stairwell works both ways and therefore walking straight up the middle disrupts the flow--I mean, despite abundant reasons to be grumpy on a cold wet miserable morning, those two words on the side of a truck make me smile.

Later I look up UPtimistic and discover than in addition to being associated with a Danish electronic band called Laid Back (which ought to be the name of the garage band I'll start in my retirement if I ever get around to learning to play an instrument), the Be UPtimistic ad campaign dates back to 2024, which lets you know just how out of touch I am re: carbonated beverage advertising, and when I look at the rationale for the ad campaign I see that I've missed many opportunities to experience what some no doubt highly paid advertising copywriter chose to call "UPliftment." 

I confess that I felt uplifted when I saw the ad on the side of that big green truck this morning, which accords with 7UP's stated mission to "offer light relief from the mundanities of daily life by bringing moments of UPliftment, positivity and surprise." A little tautological there with the reference to the dailiness of daily life or the mundanities of the mundane, but what do you expect from a company that asserts that this ad campaign "signifies a refreshed strategic and creative north star for the brand that will inform all international programs moving forward"? Frankly, I was not aware that the north star needed refreshing or that it was capable of informing programs, forward-moving or otherwise, but then I'm not raking in the big bucks writing ad copy so what right have I to be critical?

No, today I'm choosing to put my critical tendencies aside and focus on abundant reasons to be UPtimistic, even if I don't drink 7UP and don't intend to start and even if the ice keeps making life treacherous and the mud makes me slide and the atmosphere in academe is as murky as it's ever been. Tomorrow we'll celebrate the College's birthday but today I'll warm up by celebrating a great class discussion in American Lit Survey this morning, a pair of colleagues wearing cheery pink outfits, a couple of writing buddies keeping my fingers on the keyboard, a semi-disastrous attempt to make a pumpkin dump cake that nevertheless resulted in deliciousness (not deliciousment), a warm coat, a good night's sleep, and the opportunity to do it all again tomorrow, only with cupcakes.

So life is rough but I'm UPtimistic. (But I draw the line at UPliftment.) 

A new Olympic sport?

I thought I'd gathered a good number of eggs from the chicken coop yesterday until I realized that two of the eggs were actually golf balls. "Don't fry them," texted the resident chicken fancier, whose temporary non-residence resulted in my being tasked with gathering yesterday's eggs, an easy task in balmy weather but downright treacherous when the intervening landscape would be most suitably traversed via luge.

After what feels like years but is probably just weeks trapped in a repeated snow/slush/freeze cycle, the slopes on our property are now covered with a thick layer of snow topped with ice that sometimes holds firm and sometimes allows the feet to break through. I wore stout shoes and carried a walking stick and stayed near the path beaten by my husband's boots, but I still found it difficult walking down the hill and then back up again without losing my footing or losing my cool or losing the delicate eggs (or the golf balls). 

As everyone except me obviously knows, putting golf balls in the nesting box encourages the chickens to lay eggs there rather than, for instance, under the coop or on the ground or in the feed trough. I would have noticed that two of the eggs I'd gathered looked different from the others if I'd been wearing my glasses, but I knew the trek would be a bit of a slog and I can't wear glasses when I'm sweating because they slide down my face, and what with the walking stick and gloves and egg basket, I certainly wouldn't have been capable of pushing my glasses back up again once they'd started sliding.

In this kind of weather, egg-gathering ought to be considered an Olympic sport: it requires special equipment, physical strength, and manual dexterity, and it would benefit by the addition of a luge and ski lift. Who will call the International Olympic Committee? I would do it myself but I've got to clean up the fried-golf-ball mess.    

Snowpocalypse staredown

What else is there to say?

Birding the Snowpocalypse

Years ago a friend from California visited our house and her young daughter was jumping up and down about these beautiful red birds at the feeders.

Cardinals. She'd never seen a cardinal before. 

Around here, they're common as dirt--especially on a day like today, with snow all over everything and an easy source of seeds at our feeders. It's not unusual to look outside and see a dozen or more cardinals vying for position. Later during mating season the males get all territorial, but right now they're content to hang out all together in the trees surrounding our feeders, along with woodpeckers, titmice, chickadees, finches, juncos, and a solitary towhee. It's unusual to have juncos and towhees at the same time, but there they are.

So far, Snowpocalypse has been pretty, with just a few inches of snow covering the roads last night and more big, fluffy flakes coming down this morning. But now the snow has changed to sleet. Who knows what's coming next? No plows have come down my road yet but I don't have to go anywhere today so I think I'll stay home and watch the birds. I can worry about the roads tomorrow.

The view from my bedroom window.

First towhee of the season.