A June landscape is incomplete without water. Best of all, the river; but if not this, then a creek, a brook, or even the quiet mill-pond. However pleasant the day may be, the breeze cool, the blossoms bright, the shade dense, the sunshine tempered, there still is something wanting. The world has an unfinished look when there is no water in view, and wild life is largely of the same opinion. I have often found many an upland field almost deserted when the meadows and the river bank were crowded. ~ Charles Conrad Abbott (Days Out of Doors)
Everywhere, from sunup to sunup, the world is full of song. The days are hot, hot, and all the day long I listen to the bees lifting from flower to flower, to the watchful chipmunk sounding its chock chock chock alarm while the red-tailed hawk wheels, crying, high in the sky. I can’t see the songbirds in the dappled light of a thousand leafy branches, but I can hear them calling from the trees. ~ Margaret Renkl (The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year)
5.29.16 ~ Virtu Art Festival Wilcox Park, Westerly, Rhode Island
Every day my cell phone sends me a random selection of pictures it has taken in the past. When this whimsical photo of a lion popped up I wondered where on earth it came from! Turns out it was taken nine years ago at an art festival we used to love to go to, even though I honestly don’t remember this particular piece.
Some people have a way of arranging everything about them, so the objects take on not only their own meaning, and a relation to the other things displayed with them, but something more besides — an indefinable aura that belongs as much to their invisible owner as to the objects themselves. ~ Diana Gabaldon (Voyager)
I am one of those people who carefully curates all the meaningful objects I’ve collected over the years. And a good many of these mementos have come from artists with booths at the Virtu Art Festival in Westerly, Rhode Island. A close up photograph of a barred owl on a snowy evergreen, infused onto a sheet of aluminum… A uniquely shaped turned wood vase with a tall spire-shaped lid… A glazed earthenware pot with a little bunny head on the rim on one side, and a little bunched-up bunny tail on the other side… I didn’t buy every year we went, but if I fell in love with something I was more than willing to break the budget to bring it home.
I do miss those days! All my most precious keepsakes survived the drastic downsizing we did to move down here, and they have been arranged anew, still, perhaps going forward it’s a good thing that I’ll no longer be tempted to add even more “objects” to my home.
In the human order creativity is neither a rational, deductive process nor an irrational wandering of the undisciplined mind but the emergence of beauty as mysteriously as the blossoming of a field of daisies out of the dark Earth. ~ Thomas Berry (The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century)
On June 1, Ukrainian forces struck deep inside Russia in “Operation Spider Web.” One hundred and seventeen drones, each operated by its own pilot, hit airfields in five regions. Ukraine says the drones hit 41 strategic bombers that had been attacking Ukrainian cities and destroyed at least 13 of them. Russia does not have the industrial capabilities to replace them. ….. The operation took more than 18 months of planning. It apparently involved sending trucks loaded with wooden cabins that had detachable roofs that could be opened remotely. Unsuspecting truck drivers hauled the cabins to locations near airbases, where the drones launched. …..Once the drones were in the air, the vehicles carrying the cabins exploded. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said the people who helped with the operation from within Russia had been withdrawn and “are now safe.” ….. Russia denied that the damage was that extensive, but there is no doubt that the attack was a significant blow to Russia’s war effort, demonstrating as it does that Ukraine can bring the war home. ….. Analysts recognize the Ukrainian attack as a new moment in warfare. ~ Heather Cox Richardson (Letters from an American, June 3, 2025)
Слава Україні! 🌻 Slava Ukraini! 🌻 Glory to Ukraine!
The clearing rests in song and shade. It is a creature made By old light held in soil and leaf, By human joy and grief, By human work, Fidelity of sight and stroke, By rain, by water on The parent stone. ~ Wendell Berry (This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems)
It seems like it’s been raining and dreary for the past couple of weeks — we even turned the heat on a couple of times. But we’ve been seeing a lot of interesting creatures outside our windows, like this baby bunny I caught with my camera. One morning I saw two opossums scrounging around in the leaf litter for food, and another time I saw a coyote trotting across the back yard.
One day when returning from grocery shopping we were very excited to find four fledgling Carolina wrens trying out their wings on the wax myrtle branches in our front yard. And those darling Carolina chickadees who nested in our birdhouse had some little ones, too. They flit about so quickly I can’t count them but there are at least three and I got to see a parent feeding one of them.
And one delightful afternoon Kat and I designed a dragon garden to fill in the unused birdbath in the front yard. 💜
5.20.25 ~ North Carolina Botanical Garden ‘peve minaret’ bald cypress
I can’t stop thinking about something a naturopathic oncologist told my sister, who was recently diagnosed with endometrial cancer, the same kind of cancer I had. Apparently having blood group A is associated with an increased risk of cancer, and blood group O is associated with a decreased risk of cancer. Both my sister and I have type A blood.
wild quinine
Coincidentally, a few days after learning this, while going through another one of my family history boxes — I’m now on box #6 of the 14 — I found my mother’s blood type A identification card from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she was receiving treatment for metastasized breast cancer in 1990. She died when she was 59, in spite of four years of surgery, radiation and multiple chemotherapies.
goldenseal
As I was pondering the significance of now knowing her blood type, it hit me that her father, my grandfather, had prostate cancer. (I have no way of discovering what his blood type was.) With some aggressive treatments he survived his cancer and lived to the age of 95.
bigleaf magnolia
And then I started wondering about my grandfather’s parents. Locating his father’s death certificate I discovered that he died at age 75 of adenocarcinoma of the transverse colon, metastasis to liver. He had surgery in August of 1948 and died in July of 1949.
apple cactus
Finding these connections for four generations in a row is unsettling, as looking closely at genograms can often be. If I could trace it I wonder how far back the cancer line would go. All my children have type O blood so likely they will be spared from this specific cancer risk factor.
apple cactus
The gene for type A blood is dominant, and the gene for type O is recessive. Which means I have a recessive O gene that I passed on to my children. (They got their other O gene from Tim. One needs two O genes to have type O blood. Tim also has type O blood so that’s the only kind of gene he could give them.) It surprises me that none of them got the dominant A gene from me because the law of averages suggests that half of my children could have received it and had type A blood!
bulltongue arrowhead
Until my sister consulted one, I never knew that naturopathic oncologists existed. After witnessing the nightmare I’m living through due to radiotherapy aftereffects she is not interested in submitting to the same recommended treatment for her cancer. We both are of the mind that sometimes, for some people, quality of life is more valuable than a prolonged quantity of life. It will be interesting to see what things we will learn about other treatments from this alternative, integrative physician.
golden marguerite
Meanwhile, the current administration continues its efforts to cut funding for health care and cancer research. And now this:
If you’re under 65 and don’t have a chronic condition, there’s a very real chance you won’t have access to a Covid-19 vaccine this fall. Much depends on what happens next month. ACIP could defy the FDA and recommend vaccines for broader use, but that would be risky. We’ve never been in this situation before. ….. This isn’t about whether everyone needs a yearly Covid-19 vaccine—that’s a legitimate, ongoing scientific debate, and one ACIP was already tackling in June. This is about how decisions are made—and who gets to make them. FDA political appointees are sidelining expert panels, bypassing transparency, and turning public health into a performance. That might fly in other arenas, but shouldn’t when it comes to people’s health and daily lives. ….. Vaccine decisions must be rooted in evidence, debate, and transparency. ….. If this is the new model, we should all be alarmed. ~ Katelyn Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist, May 21, 2025)
silver dollar eucalyptus
Closer to home, last summer I endured three episodes of seed tick bites on my legs following walks in the botanical garden. I thought I had solved the problem by using recommended permethrin as a repellent but when I took a walk there on Tuesday I was attacked again and now have 9 bites. I’m done! The pictures in this post are not worth the price I’m paying to have gotten them!
