Swallowtail

Watching our newly landscaped front yard has become one of my particular joys this year. Where once there existed a lackluster lawn, pockmarked with chipmunk burrows—which I had to continually mow—now new plants take turns proffering flowers for the pollinators. The spicebush swallowtail butterfly shown above would have shown up better were not its wings fluttering madly as it sampled the scarlet beebalm flowers. Sharing the butterfly’s zeal were bees of all sizes: little ones that looked like flying sugar ants about a quarter-inch long to bumblebees and something larger which I haven’t identified yet.

As May ended and turned to June, fireflies appear at dusk to illuminate the plants. Shrubby St. John’s wort, below, seems to be a favorite of the Easter honeybee.

Amber waves of grain

To all those who served and gave their lives. They didn’t always know why, but they served anyway.

Where are we going in this handbasket?

The world is going to hell in a handbasket. This attitudinal shift remains a nearly unavoidable aspect of aging. We age and cast off following things for their own sakes. For example, fashion? Oh sure, we keep an eye on it, rotating neckties or jewelry to our favorite “it-will-come-back-into-fashion” location, but we pick and choose. Skinny, tailored suits? On this old beer-bellied bod? I think not. Hip-hugging jeans, says my wife? “I never wore them when they were in fashion decades ago!” And don’t get her started about wearing clothes which look more like lingerie than outer garments.

Everything’s going to hell. For us oldsters, new technologies get picked up as they’re convenient, and when they serve a purpose, not because they’re trendy. Consider: smart phones debuted (debatably) in 2006. I waited six years, until 2012, to get one. Even then I got it mostly because I needed a better communication tool when I started consulting. I might have picked up one eventually. I’m sure I would have been forced/enticed into it sometime before 2020…maybe. After all, I’m a techie; I like all the toys. About forty years ago I could hardly wait to upgrade my first desktop computer or for it to conk out and justify buying a new one. Now? I’m leisurely approaching the time when I’ll dig into my Windows 10 machine and tweak its registry settings to permit upgrading to Windows 11. Another old man thing: texting has proven to be a boon but it doesn’t replace email. And why trade clean, open texting for the closed gardens of WhatsApp, the-app-formerly-known-as-Twitter, or Instagram? I resisted Facebook for years, but joined ten years ago. I grew uneasy with a technology that demands everyone ‘talk’ all the time. Doesn’t someone have to listen? And how can everyone something important to say? The horrible year of 2020 pushed me to delete the account. Who wants to be sanctioned for being reasonable? (I understand getting attacked for being ‘out there’, but for being calm and objective?) My point’s drifting here, old man! It’s this: seven decades in, one learns it isn’t very important to follow every trend…or pretty much any trend.

These thoughts crept into my mind as it wandered from thinking about our church’s chorister program (elementary and junior high students who sing in the cathedral once in a while) to the pre-pubescent boys who sing at New College, Oxford, or in the Vienna Boys choir, until finally it came to rest on my own 5th and 6th grade experience of participating in All-City Chorus in Spokane, WA. This program met once or twice a week after school in the most centrally located public high school, Lewis and Clark. How did I get there? I took the bus. Due to its meandering route the trip lasted about half an hour as it drove the seven miles from my elementary school to LCHS. I can’t remember if I took the bus home, or if my father picked me up, since he worked less than a mile away and would have been leaving work about that time. My brother similarly took private clarinet lessons in an old building downtown. It housed a music store on the street level and housed offices on the second floor, one for his teacher. My brother also took the bus, catching it at the end of the block where we lived, and traveling the same amount of time and distance as I. This wasn’t unusual for 10-year-olds at the time. My mind kept wandering. I wondered how common that is now. I don’t know as a parent if I would rest easy letting my child do the same. I’m certain few if any modern parents would. Kids seem to be scheduled for most of their free time and driven by an adult to these activities. This illustrates my point, the one I wandered to this morning:

Old people experienced a different world. I don’t care which generation you’re considering, it wasn’t necessarily worse in their mind. We–any of us at any point in time–dealt with what we dealt with. Life presented itself, and we were up to date with it. We cling to some of the practices from back then, not because they’re antiquated but because they worked. We cling to the beliefs which those practices engendered. Let me explain, by way of an example, how life occurred and thus, how we think and thought. Consider the situation in which two parents decide to let their boys travel alone on a city bus after school. During the winter we left our respective music activities in the dark—Spokane lies a latitudinal degree further north than Duluth, MN, and almost three degrees further north than Bangor, ME. How could a parent allow this? First, we didn’t have two cars. Though we were comfortably middle class, it wasn’t that unusual for families to have only one car. My parents decided they could share it—Dad took the bus at least two days each week—and the money would be better saved for other things (notably our college education). Dad could have taken the bus on those music days, though, leaving Mom the car to shuttle her children.

But you see, that was just a strange notion back in the 1960’s. Kids gained in freedom when they gained in age and maturity. When we were very young, three to five years old, we were told where our boundaries were in the neighborhood. We respected them (mostly). We got to travel the block and only on our street. I got in severe trouble when I crossed the street at the end of our block and decided with a couple other kids it would be fun to roll rocks down the hillside. (It didn’t occur to me that there were cars on the road a hundred feet below us or what a rock the size of a teapot might do to a car.) When a county sheriff’s deputy delivered us to our parents, we caught a lot of hell. When we were in elementary school we wandered wooded lots, rode bicycles for miles away from our homes, and all we had to do was say, “Mom, I’m headed down to Mitch’s house!” As we neared and then entered junior high it was more like, “so where did you two wind up today?” from my mother. Our parents expected us to entertain ourselves, stay safe, and observe the behavioral rules they laid down. We did pretty good with that first part, fairly good with the second part, and…what they didn’t know didn’t hurt them, right?

Today therefore represents a path to perdition, always, for every old person. I stay optimistic generally (and the further I look into the future), but many things worry me about habits which younger people have acquired. I now can see that 100 years ago cars would worry a 70-year-old born in 1855. “Everybody scootin’ and tootin’ these infernal muh-SHEENS! T’aint nachurl! Next thing ya know, people won’t even live together cuz they can just drive to work!” with the word “drive” carrying all the distaste and disapproval an old man might feel.

Humans measure the world using an internal scale developed through experience. We slow our learning process with each passing year, experience becoming a boon and an obstacle to learning new ways. Fifty years later, we don’t even see the same world as younger people do. This is neither good or bad; it simply explains our attitudinal shift. Maybe you caught a bit of that here, but I fear I’m too caught up in it to accurately relay it to you. Everyone my age is nodding their head while everyone thirty years younger has made some derisive sound en route to dismissing the whole notion out of hand.

So be it. You’ll see.

Surrendering…

…to the laziness of posting yet more cat photos because I haven’t been able to complete the pieces I’ve written this past week. Sigh. The late spring/early summer weather has Charlie and Benny enjoying the deck or any other place the sleep bug drops them…

Lately, Charlie sleeps with me, and Benny sleeps with my wife. This is because Charlie and I snore. I often sleep with a pillow between my ankles due to bunion and ankle pain. Looks like Charlie has taken a page from my book.

Like many “elderly” folk, my hips and back have bothered me a lot in the past few years. A lousy choice in recliners exacerbates the problem. Charlie thinks orthopedic cushions offer just the support he needs.

Charlie, using a lumbar support for (ahem) “gastric support”. May 2025.

On Easter Monday Benny went under the knife for removal of a neck cyst. It endured benignly until we had it drained earlier this year. He subsequently scratched it, tore it open, and surgery sounded like the best path. He surprisingly took the soft cone in stride, complaining little. Biggest issue? Drinking out of the cat fountain. He napped, waiting the ten days until its removal.

Sun-toasted decking makes a good nap spot. April 2025.

Cinco de Mayo visitor

Monday as we sat down to breakfast, my wife noticed a guy putting something on the parking strip in front of our house. I stepped out to see what he was doing, which turned out to be moving a box turtle off of the heavily traveled street. The turtle had been close to our side of the road, so he moved it along. Box turtles have five sub-species; at first this one looked to be a Gulf Coast one, strange as that may sound here in North Carolina, but I found photos of the Eastern which resemble this one. Apparently the shell wears as they age, and the shells will become the lighter, golden color seen in the pattern on the shell above. They fairly easily live to be 100 years of age.

Wondering “why the heck is a turtle up here about a full block and uphill from where there’s a creek?”, I learned something. Box turtles hang out in moist forests and wet meadows/pastures. I would like to think transforming our front yard from grass to a meadow facilitated this little visitor, but who knows? I do wish, however, I had just watched him/her from afar because I went back out five to six minutes later, and it had disappeared. I searched diligently around our front yard, near parked cars, even back on the other side of the street, but nope–gone. I worried. Drivers looking for a short-cut found our supposedly residential street a few years ago which makes it highly hazardous to slow-moving turtles. Heck, it’s become highly hazardous to humans. Despite a posted speed of 25 mph and that it’s only three blocks long, cars routinely hit 45 mph. I hope the turtle likes our yard and decides ranging from there to the drainage swale behind our property will be its new home. It’s safer and nicer.

Our new front yard at slightly over six months of age. This photo taken the final Monday of April 2025. Many of the taller red-brown plants in the middle (foxglove beardtongue) have since flowered. The purple ones are rose mock vervain.

Neighborhood walks

Every day walkers march past our house. They pass every ten minutes or so in the early morning, then dwindle. When summer brings 80+ degrees by mid-morning, accompanied with 80% relative humidity, “only mad dogs and Englishmen” will attempt a walk. Some walk to exercise dogs which have seemingly conducted a PR campaign to make sure every house has at least one. Some walk because they like it. (You can tell: they appear to be in good physical shape, they walk on a regular schedule, they seem to enjoy it.) Others walk because someone told them to–perhaps a doctor, a spouse, their conscience, a good friend, or one of the ubiquitous self-help gurus on the internet. We suspect one elderly gentleman walks three times each day to regulate his blood sugar. My father-in-law did that for many years, and managed in that endeavor to postpone insulin shots for more than a decade.

For several weeks I’ve joined them on this circuit, up and down this short stretch of street, oddly reminiscent of a treadmill laid out in a short course of concrete. I’ve learned by leaning into this as a practice (as opposed to “an exercise program”). Sometimes, I walk more slowly, listening to my muscles, my fortitude, walking within the boundaries of what is possible. Sometimes I push my pace exuberantly, reveling in my ability at 70 to suck oxygen into my lungs quickly enough to maintain this rapid pace, thrilled that EXERCISE can still be a part of one’s life.

Today I melded the two, yielding to an inner desire to go slower, not for physical reasons but to focus on the incremental occurrences which blow by me normally. Today….

I noticed how rapidly tulip poplars have dropped their blossoms. Apparently a quick flowering gets consummated as rapidly. Their flowers no longer being necessary….

Tulip Poplar flowers. Raleigh, NC. April 2025.

It’s trash day and with it, yard waste pickup day. Reflecting the beginning of the spring/summer interface, we see sights such as these…

Overfull yard waste containers. Raleigh, NC. April 2025.

Circling at the block’s end, I encounter my across-the-street neighbor’s sidewalk. Older than me, quite likely in his 80’s, he maintains his large corner lot minimally. Those of us who pass make our own paths through the accumulation of leaves he does not clear:

Many sights beckon, but one cannot stop every few feet to snap photos. (Not if one desires to arrive home and brew tea before one’s spouse arrives at the kitchen.) At the “modern” end of the three-block length of our street, where a developer with more cachet than aesthetics decided “hey, a boulevard would be nice,” said boulevard is filled with ornamental trees which have no right to be here. This is a Chinese snowball tree, on the backside of its blooming peak:

Chinese snowball tree. Raleigh, NC. April 2025.

One of the delights of continuously walking a circuit lies in encountering familiar sights suddenly made new. How does one walk past a plant daily without focusing on what it is? Suddenly it blooms, saying, “Take notice! Look at me!” I did not use my plant identification software on this, and I don’t know what it is. It looks rose-like, but obviously it isn’t. A mystery to be solved for another day:

A plant. A beautiful plant. Another day. Raleigh, NC. April 2025.

And one notices the fire ants have established many beachheads in the sidewalk crevices.

Fire ant colony. Raleigh, NC. April 2025.

Finally, arriving at the start point, one marvels at the stark contrast of a natural environment composed of native plants that have flowered vociferously in the past weeks.

Our front yard, six months after its installation. Raleigh, NC. April 2025.

Mock vervain (I think) on the left, Robin’s plantain on the right (a cultivar of fleabane). Raleigh, NC. April 2025.

Watching a specific environment over time delivers meaning which a one-time walk through a park does not. The tide and ebb of the seasons, the minor changes in foliage, the calls of the birds as they cycle through a mating season, the feel of the air as less humid air gives way to summer–all of this imprints the incremental passage of time on one’s psyche.

My (not) National Holiday

Baycare Ballpark aka the Spring Training home of the Philadelphia Phillies. Empty equals “good” because that means the Phillies are playing Games That Count.
February 2023. [photo courtesy of my wife]

My mid-life crisis, hastened by my restlessness and a divorce at 37, manifested itself in a return to religion–the religions of Roman Catholicism, baseball, and a writing practice. Lead back to baseball via my love of sports photography (in the form of baseball cards), I recaptured the romanticism of the game at the same time my marriage unraveled. Two years later I followed the ’93 Phillies as they improbably ran the National League table only to lose a heartbreaker of game and the World Series to the Toronto Blue Jays. (Curse you, Joe Carter.) By then I had been initiated in the superstitions of a very superstitious sport which is why I’ve today laid in a full case of Yuengling beers, official beer of the Phillies. No more feeling a personal responsibility for the team’s abrupt departure from last year’s postseason.

I’ve said it here before, but in truncated form: it’s a travesty that the National Pastime isn’t recognized with a National Holiday on Opening Day. I kinda think it should be a federal requirement to give employees mandatory personal days if they want to watch a deciding game of the World Series, but these days all the games are held in the evening.

Once again the pre-season prognosticators have dissed the Phillies by predicting far fewer wins than last year and a second or third place finish. Last year they predicted the Phillies would finish third, despite having all players back healthy for the entire season, most notably Bryce Harper who opened the season on the Injured List and played only 2.5 months in the field. Here’s how their chances to win (a subjective measurement for sure) changed over the season:

Spurious statistics department: note when pundits woke up, smelled the coffee, and quickly started pumping up the Phillies’ chances to advance to the postseason. Not only did they, the team won the National League East, dumping the other two teams shown here. (Of course, the Mets thumped them in the NL Division Series.) Source: ESPN broadcast, obviously.

Folks who have followed my baseball posts for a few years will know I get ticked off at the knee-jerk comments made without looking at historical facts and statistics. The chart above is based on historical averages for all teams (I think) and adds in the “strength” of the teams to be played. (The determination of strong versus weak schedules will be another rant for another day.) No one can make more than general predictions on this first day of the season: the White Sox have little chance of making the postseason; the Dodgers would have to suffer multiple injuries to not make the postseason; the Rockies fans should demand a better a team.

Why I love baseball and the Phillies is delineated in a three-part post here.

Catching up

It’s been a lengthy stretch of sporadic posting at best. I’ve excused it with “spending time with my wife” and “getting things done” which certainly sound worthy. We’ve just returned from attending her mother’s funeral. (More on that later.) A slate of urgent tasks demands my attention, as does maintaining my health, both physical and mental.

A few pieces of writing, stubs and nothing more, await more attention than I can manage right now. Today let’s just review the two-plus weeks since I posted a hawk in our front yard. Hawks continue to drop by, a vivid affirmation to our decision to rip out the front lawn and install native plants—and especially to my decision to let the leaves lie where they fall. The leaf cover has fostered those little grubs and bugs birds like eat and extends to small rodents for the hawks.

Sadly, rodents (squirrels) ripped into the blossoms of our star magnolia. This is as good as it ever looked this spring:

Star magnolia in the middle of March, 2025.

Perhaps the false starts to spring affected it? We had days in the 70’s and hit 80 once before cold weather set in again, complete with dustings of snow and some freezing rain. The cold became brutal for North Carolina, dropping into the teens. This delayed the magnolia’s blooming by two weeks or more. It looked like this last year, weeks earlier:

Reposted from 2024. Star magnolia on February 29, 2024.

We revisited the Duling-Kurtz Country Inn in Exton, PA, Sunday evening. Sitting up by the fire that evening pleased us both. Dressing for the funeral in this room made things marginally better than performing the same in a generic Hilton or Marriott property.

The Winston Churchill Room at the Duling-Kurtz Country Inn. The sharp-eyed viewers will have noted the presence of TWO bathrooms. Two very small rooms were obviously turned into one. The door to one room no longer being needed (center), it was turned into a closet. March 2025, Exton, PA.

We’re on the eve of a personal holiday, Opening Day of Baseball. The joy baseball brings will temper the immediate sorrow of losing our last parent. This year promises many highs and lows, a challenge from start to finish. “May you live in interesting times.” Indeed.

Dropping in

Red-shouldered hawk, Raleigh, NC. March 2025

Just before breakfast today we looked out to the front yard and watched a Red-shouldered hawk taking a small rodent for its breakfast. It took a couple of minutes. Leaving the leaves: good idea. That’s the street in the background. Due to last fall’s landscaping, the front yard is crowned, hiding the sidewalk and the parking strip.

Belated Spring

Typically, or typical for the previous few years, our star magnolia blossoms sometime between the first week of February and around Valentine’s Day. Yesterday (February 27th), I looked out as I opened the blinds and saw many swollen, fuzzy buds, but no blossoms. Just after 10:30 I looked again and saw several had said, “Sun! Hooray!” and opened up to greet it. Spring, as defined by me, starts when some of the days peak at 60-70 degrees (or higher here in North Carolina) with the additional stipulation of the early bloomers: daffodils, magnolias, the camellia, and a few others. This occurs in the first half of February usually, although cold and sometimes snow have occurred too in those weeks. Put a gun to my head and I would admit we can’t count on these blossoms until about the end of February. Our winters have been warm for a handful of years. A return to a more normal range of temperatures in February (complete with a windy, cold snow-and-ice storm on the 19th) perhaps signals a return to normalcy.