…oh a-dither, a-dather! Do we riff off of “pipers piping”? Or go with the 1909 version of “ladies dancing” (now moved to number 12)? Or “drummers drumming” in a competing version from 1907? Or, my personal favorite, “bears a-beating” from a 1900 version? And there are others involving other barnyard animals. It’s my little conceit, this 12-day run of posts: I’m picking the bears. I don’t have nine of them in one photo. So….
…and multiply by three…
…gave to me…six geese a-swimming…
…brought to me, two turtles of lassitude…
Yep, all that celebrating is catching up with me. So many more days to go! If one simply must attend to a few bills (as I did today), at least having a good soundtrack will help. Today we had The Night The Guitars Came To Play by Micky Moody and Bernie Marsden.
I’m having difficulties commenting on any blogs, so I’m checking to see if I can post.
The trees blushed last night, embarrassed they're leaving so soon, like those party guests who upon seeing John sit at the piano while another round gets ordered, reach quietly for their coats, murmuring, "we have an early morning"...
I’ve been laid up, figuratively speaking, from a lower back issue which has made standing up problematic. Little good has come from this, but today as a bit of therapy, I took a perambulation around our yard and the near neighbors. Here’s what early autumn looks like in Raleigh, NC. The shrub above does its thing along our front walk. I’m too lazy to look up what it is.
To give y’all perspective, about 75% of all leaves are still green. I know, this is different than Up North. The 2nd weekend of October always had the reputation for being the peak of leaf-peeping season when I lived in New York near the Massachusetts border. Here…it’s a little different. In the above photo, the two tallest trees which stand in front of the others, are two tulip poplars in our backyard. (The house roofline is visible at the bottom of the photo.) The one on the left is exposed more with no tall trees immediately around it. It starts dropping a few leaves in late July or early August because our heat stresses it (I guess). It starts dropping leaves before anything else, and at this point is 75% bare. The tree on the right sits further back, and is protected more as a result. It’s just now taken a decidedly yellow tone with most of its leaves. As you can see, many of the trees remain green. At the bottom of the photo are the upper branches of a dogwood. Not all of the trees remain in a green state, though….
This is what all of the dogwoods on the property look like. We have six or eight. If they aren’t this red, they’re a mix of dusky red and green. Some trees around us are a bit further along…
Chrysanthemums aren’t the only fall flowers. The above is blue mistflower and blooms somewhere around Labor Day. It stays beautiful until a really good frost hits. Fortunately, that shouldn’t happen for at least a week, so we’ll usher in November with these lovelies still blooming. They’re ‘volunteers’ as near as I can figure: they don’t look as if they were planted because they grow in several of our flower beds. The ones above appear along the walk to our front door, appearing when I most lament the end of the purple coneflowers.
Sometimes autumn is just here and there…as are we…
Ciao, y’all.
Universe beneath my feet surreal: optimistically colored.
As mentioned in a post on Monday, last week I began an unusual period of travel: all of it by someone else, unless you count this day-trip to coastal waters last Friday. The above contradicts the National Weather Service’s forecast of partly sunny, but temps were in the 70’s, and it wasn’t raining. I would have traded Thursday’s sunny weather, but it permitted a nice walk around Lake Lynn where we espied turtles, ducks, geese, more turtles, still more turtles, and a couple of hunting herons:
That afternoon my good buddy received his wish, and we visited the Duke University Store to purchase swag. While there we took a quick peek at the chapel:
The cones and barriers in the photo were courtesy of the setup for Game Day, a Saturday morning TV show focused on college football–according to my friend since I do not follow any sport except baseball. The resemblance to construction fit right in with all the real construction which was occurring nearby.
Now we entertain my brother and watch post-season baseball. Good times.
[Note to CIMPLE: all photos taken with Google Pixel 6 Pro. Top two edited with Faststone. Last one not edited.]
We watched, sadly horrified when little human-things took down Lokisson--one fine oak with humors unusual. "I lean over their rock-paths, put down by these silly human-things: they look up fearful, ignorant of my deep-rooted stability." He would laugh at his humor. If only he were stable as his roots! No. Humor's ultimate end: fearful, weak-full, they attack first. Angry, snarling chainsaws bit from all sides, ganged up, velociraptors hunting arboreal prey. We knew their type from so long ago. Elephant-bellows issued from metal contraptions which looked vaguely tree-like, screaming their masters' fears skyward, their cries sometimes oddly resembling bugling elks we heard in times before. Lokisson's beautiful limbs disappeared first, fed into hungry maws, exiting pulverized to bits. Metal sheets rang thunder to our sky. Then...section by section...his segments fell, crashing, loudly cutting off his jokes forever. We cannot laugh through our hurt, perhaps won't for many seasons. For two days afterward our living sky cried and grumbled.
all the voices in my head 