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.
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:
Spring in Raleigh, NC. April 2025.
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.
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.
I gardened better ten years ago. My beginning consulting years actually weren’t about consulting–I hired out contractually. Technically, I earned more than I had as a manager in a pill manufacturing plant, but it was tough to compare. On the one hand, individuals working freelance pay all of their own Social Security and Medicare. On the other, I got paid for every hour I worked, unlike being a manager when 50 and 60-hour weeks occurred. The best perk in 2014? A strict you-can’t-work-over-40-hours-per-week limit. Free to work those hours flexibly, I usually rolled into Friday with 36, meaning I took off around noon. Nice Friday afternoons with my wife, time to run those errands that need to occur during a business week, and time to tend the garden haphazardly.
I don’t like to garden much but I’m entranced with the idea you can grow things, especially useful things like food for humans or birds. The sunflowers were for the finches. Didn’t work at that well, and in 2015 I started real consulting, traveling all over the country and beyond. Ah well. At least I can pay to have someone else do it now.
I attempted to explain that turning 90 degrees would align his body with the patch of sunlight, but Benny was having none of it. Either he’s indifferent or simply doesn’t understand geometry. I’m going with indifferent. July 2024.
6th grade was better…
About a month ago I posted about how 1966 proved seminal in my life for appreciating music, a year when I ‘woke up’ musically. Virtually every song in the Top Ten made me smile and say, “yeah…” and almost every one of them wound up on a 1966 playlist. Today I thought, “let’s see what 1972 held for me as I approached graduation from high school.” Holy. Crap. No wonder I felt adrift for much of the year–and I had thought it could be chalked up to teenaged ennui. In the Top Ten for the first week of January I encountered artists I still don’t like more than 50 years later: the really young Michael Jackson; David Cassidy; Donny Osmond. One song I had never heard before today: “Scorpio” by Dennis Coffey and the Detroit Guitar Band. I did get to add the top four songs to my new list: “Brand New Key” by Melanie; “American Pie (Parts 1 and 2) by Don McLean; “Family Affair” by Sly and the Family Stone; and “An Old Fashioned Love Song” by Three Dog Night.
By the second week of January the Top 40 contained two versions of “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing (In Perfect Harmony)” now known forevermore as The Coke Song. A last gasp Sonny and Cher song, “All I Ever Need Is You” didn’t make the cut. Likewise anything by The Stylistics, Al Green, and who the heck is Betty Wright? Thankfully other artists were riding high or coming into their own: Van Morrison, Rod Stewart, Rare Earth, Three Dog Night, Bread, Grand Funk, The Who, T. Rex, and Elton John. Oh, yeah, and this group called Led Zeppelin put out its fourth album. “Black Dog” hit the January 8th chart.
It will be interesting to continue through the year. I distinctly remember Alice Cooper put out “I’m Eighteen” when I turned 18 myself. Just after graduation I picked up a free copy of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars wondering who the heck this David Bowie guy was. At least there’s that to look forward too. Oh, and Neil Young…and Humble Pie…hmmm…maybe this won’t be so sad after all.
The annual lily surprise
Every year this lily pops out in the middle of a row of azaleas, bringing a surprised smile. July 2024.
New hydrangea on the left, older “parent” on the right. June 2024.
A year ago our only ‘normal’ hydrangea–we have an oak-leaf hydrangea–popped out a volunteer shoot promising to be a new plant. A colony if you will. This year it bloomed. It did not bloom like the parent. Not even close. At first, I thought, “well, they’re a little more pink-tinged than the parent, but the parent has pink edges….” but look at this. They aren’t even close. Nature is wonderful, is it not?
Sometimes I feel like a baby spider floating through the air on my gossamer web-string, wondering when this little journey will end, where it will deposit me, and in general, what does the near future hold. I’m in one of those in-between times right now. I would like to tie this up neatly by saying, “Well! I’m approaching my 70th birthday this weekend, and that explains it! Ipso facto, easy-peasy, make no buts about it.” It’s not so. I’ve never lost the summer vacation feeling we all used to get at the end of May as we eagerly anticipated the end of another school year and the beginning of a responsibility-less (or less responsibility) summer. I had barely joined the workforce at the beginning of 1978 then I returned to college in September 1981. From then until 1992 I taught in public schools–summers off! After taking a year off, working the summer of 1993 started my final move, this time to a permanent career in pharmaceutical manufacturing. But…my antsy ways caused me to move cross-country in May 1997, and we moved to a new house in May of 1998, and we moved to New York in May 2001. In May 2003 my job situation changed markedly and by August I started looking for something new. Cutting to the chase: I started many of my dozen or so consultant contracts in May, plus or minus a month. Then there’s our society’s natural predilection to mark the end of May as summer, and the end of our church choir season, and the beginning of really warm weather, and the fact I’ve always loved warm weather, and…and….and…it all seems tied up with my birthday in the beginning of June.
Turtle cannibalism
My wife and I came across an odd sight this morning. The photo below, though taken in poor lighting and into murky water, shows a snapping turtle feeding on something.
Snapping turtle eating….a turtle? Lake Lynn, Raleigh, NC. June 2024.
I’m pretty sure that’s a snapping turtle. I estimated the shell at around 15 inches lengthwise, maybe 18. Snappers average 10-18 inches, so that’s the right ballpark. It took awhile to make out what was going on until I realized it was feeding, and the object of its meal-affection appeared to be an upside down turtle of pretty good size itself. They are omnivores and eat carrion.
Other sights during our walk around Lake Lynn:
One of two geese of this species we see frequently. This one stands one-legged up the slope from the lake near an apartment in the many buildings which ring the lake. Lake Lynn, Raleigh, NC. June 2024.The Lake Lynn southern parking lot has a small butterfly/pollinator bed including these Bachelor Buttons. Lake Lynn, Raleigh, NC. June 2024.In the butterfly/pollinator garden Black-eyed Susans predominate. Lake Lynn, Raleigh, NC. June 2024.
Coming home we remarked that our own surprising volunteer Black-eyed Susan plants were starting to look pretty good:
Or maybe this isn’t a Black-eyed Susan…or the others aren’t? June 2024.
Our hydrangea plant continues to weird us out by changing color just a bit every year, getting more and more pink:
Pretty sure I shared one like this last year. The blue stamen/pistils are really something. June 2024.
And this year the main hydrangea bush’s outlier, a new plant coming up beside it and presumably from the same root system, shows a new color scheme altogether, seeming to lean in to the color scheme of its parent:
New hydrangea. June 2024.
What I’m brooding on…
These lyrics by John Prine in “Hello In There” haunted me in the 1970s and do so more the older I get. “Happy” Monday to you all.
"Hello In There"
We had an apartment in the city, Me and Loretta liked living there. Well, it's been years since the kids had grown, A life of their own left us alone. John and Linda live in Omaha, And Joe is somewhere on the road. We lost Davy in the Korean war, And I still don't know what for, Don't matter anymore.
You know that old trees just grow stronger, And old rivers grow wilder every day. Old people just grow lonesome Waiting for someone to say, "Hello in there. Hello."
Me and Loretta, we don't talk much more, She sits and stares through the back door screen. And all the news just repeat itself Like some forgotten dream that we've both seen. Someday I'll go and call up Rudy, We worked together at the factory. But what could I say if he asks "What's new?" "Nothing, what's with you? Nothing much to do."
You know that old trees just grow stronger, And old rivers grow wilder every day. Old people just grow lonesome Waiting for someone to say, "Hello in there. Hello."
So if you're walking down the street sometime And spot some hollow ancient eyes, Please don't just pass 'em by and stare As if you didn't care, say, "Hello in there. Hello."
First purple coneflower of the season. Not very purple, but just bloomed out today. All flowers are doing well due to mild weather with just the right amount of moisture. May 2024.
all the voices in my head 