hjemme – Page 2 – In the Woods

damp, dark and dreary

What a strange month August has been so far. After July ended with the distinction of being the hottest month ever recorded in North Carolina history, in stark contrast, the first 17 days of August never reached the average high temperature of 90. But the dew point has remained very high, giving me a new appreciation for the term warm and muggy. We’ve had a lot of rain and every day feels damp, dark and dreary.

On August 6 we spent two and a half hours seeing a pulmonologist and received an alarming diagnosis for Tim, interstitial lung disease. This finally explains his increasing shortness of breath and the cough, in spite of having all his heart disease issues addressed. We’re still trying to come to terms with all this new information and future uncertainties. It didn’t help having the washing machine and the air conditioning break down in the middle of things.

I’m more and more impatient for some better weather in the autumn so we can get outside again. In the meantime, as far as blogging goes, I distract myself with searching for and then pairing quotes and paintings, and have scheduled quite a few of them to be published many months from now. I’m making good progress with my resistance training, treadmill walking, and tai chi, but it’s not the same as walking among the trees. Work on my family history boxes has stalled.

Returning home from the laundromat early one morning I discovered these ghostly white things sticking up out of the moss in our front yard. My first thought was ghost plants but these are much smaller and don’t have a flower on top. I learned they are a fungus called clavaria. There may be 1200 species in the genus and I don’t know which species these are. They do seem to love my very damp moss garden, though.

wordless wednesday

a fledgling cardinal

It’s been so sweet listening to our cardinals sing this summer, and now they have some youngsters exploring the world around them.

This one seemed particularly interested in our birdbath so I was able to get some fuzzy pictures through the sliding glass doors. He kept picking up and putting down catkins, splinters, and twigs, as if he was learning what might or might not be edible. He never did go into the water, though.

So, art thou feathered, art thou flown,
Thou naked thing? — and canst alone
Upon the unsolid summer air
Sustain thyself, and prosper there?
Shall no more with anxious note
Advise thee through the happy day,
Thrusting the worm into thy throat,
Bearing thine excrement away?
Alas, I think I see thee yet,
Perched on the windy parapet,
Defer thy flight a moment still
To clean thy wing with careful bill.
And thou are feathered, thou art flown;
And hast a project of thine own.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay
(The Fledgling)

wordless wednesday

bluebird bath at high noon

7.1.25 ~ eastern bluebird couple in for a bath

male bluebird drying off on the deck railing

young chipping sparrow under the birdbath, waiting for a turn

same young chipping sparrow waiting patiently from the railing
(he/she never did get a turn)

male contemplating a third dip in the bath

a second cousin, twice removed

Saturday afternoon I opened box #9 of the 14 family history boxes I’m going through. In it I found this magazine page, torn from the August 1915 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. The portrait sketch of Miss Helen Hamilton was done by Harrison Fisher, an American artist born in 1875 in Brooklyn, New York, known for his illustrations of women.

Turns out Helen Hamilton was a second cousin of Tim’s grandmother, Allegra Hamilton. They were great-granddaughters of Benjamin Hamilton (1792-1880). Helen was about 19 years old in this sketch. She went on to marry Frederick Vincent and Allegra married Tim’s grandfather, Karl Rodgers. I wonder how well they knew each other, as Helen lived in California and Allegra lived in New York. I don’t know most of my second cousins.

This box is densely packed with newspaper clippings, correspondence, and research notes from Tim’s great-grandmother, Gertrude Hubbard. It’s going to take me a long time to get it organized! That’s okay, though, I’ve got a long hot summer ahead of me.

Meanwhile, I’ve been enjoying the cardinals singing in the wax myrtle tree outside my kitchen window every morning.

golden hours

🌻

The sun is rich
And gladly pays
In golden hours,
Silver days,

And long green weeks
That never end.

~ John Updike
(A Child’s Calendar, June)

🌻

throwback thursday

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.

on a happier note

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. 💜