Eastern honeybee (?) on just opened sunflower. July 2025.
I feed birds, mostly black-oil sunflower seeds. This year it looks like I’ll through about 400 pounds of them. Apparently one got planted in our newly landscaped front yard, and there amid many of the similar-spiky Obedient plants was this lone sunflower. I love sunflowers. Therefore, I got pretty irritated when something, probably a deer, nipped off the top where a bud had been forming. The joke’s on the deer, though. By trimming the plant, it put up TWO stalks from where it had been lopped, each of which had buds…until one burst open on Independence Day.
…or crepe myrtles if you prefer…seem ubiquitous here in Raleigh, NC. From what I read and hear they’re throughout the South, though I haven’t paid enough attention while driving through our neighbor states. Crape myrtles take their time, slowly becoming substantial trees of a type called thicket trees. They can be well-tended and trained, as this one is:
With care, the trunks grow together. Raleigh, NC. July 2025.
Usual care involves letting them grow as they will, but pruning suckers and sometimes trimming the tops to shape them:
Crape myrtle with usual thicket look and showing white blooms. Raleigh, NC. July 2025.
Crape myrtles are everywhere here. The photo above is across the street from the first photo. The thicket-trunked myrtle in the foreground has a substantial myrtle right to its left, the one with a more substantial trunk. Follow the sidewalk and you’ll see two more, smaller (younger) crape myrtles flowering. These last two demonstrate the variety of the approximately 50 species of crape myrtle (or are a particular cultivar of one):
Younger, different crape myrtles. Raleigh, NC. July 2025.
Crape myrtle are maintained by the City of Raleigh in the decorative medians:
Three “City” crape myrtles at the end of my street. Raleigh, NC. July 2025.
To me the Ultimate Crape Myrtle lives in my neighbor’s yard. Its branches extend from the edge of the sidewalk and tower over her house. It’s at least 30 feet tall. Someone appears to have pruned a few suckers in its youth, but mostly it’s been left to its own.
Crape myrtle in neighbor’s yard. Our white car and yard in the background. Raleigh, NC. July 2025.
And then there are our crape myrtles. Ours were planted sometime between 2007 and 2014 (using Google Maps Street View), with the most likely time frame being 2010-2012, a period when the former owners rapidly changed the landscaping and interior of the house. The myrtles probably were purchased as saplings, and have doubled in height for the eight years we’ve lived here. For reasons I suspect have to do with amount of sunlight and my utter lack of any care beyond occasional pruning, they flower very late. I suspect sunlight because my other neighbor has three, also near the sidewalk, which haven’t bloomed yet either. In the photos above you might have noticed most of the myrtles nearing the end of their blooming period. Ours?
Our two crape myrtles, either side of the driveway, not blooming. July 2025.
But here’s the thing: though closely identified with the American South, they are not native to it. To quote the NC State University’s Extension Gardener website, “[Crape myrtle] is native to the Philippines, Japan and central Himalayas to southern China and Indochina.” Our whole move the past 12 months has been to replace everything in the front yard with native plants. (note that in the photo above) After a year of debate, and many years of saying, “Maybe they will bloom better when they get bigger,” we’ve decided to replace them. (Sorry, former owners. Consider it payback for removing that big tree in the front yard and not properly having the stump ground. I nearly broke my ankle in that mess many a time.) On one side will be an ‘Amethyst’ witch hazel which blooms in winter and very early spring. (Photo here.) On the other side will be a serviceberry. It mimics the look of a crape myrtle with the multi-trunk growth, but it will provide berries for birds and other critters.
Eight-point buck meandering through our trees. July 2025.
Our street, above, regularly sees traffic of 35 mph and above now that a lot of drivers have discovered it’s a better-than-nothing shortcut from one arterial to another. (Raleigh arterials commonly have a 45 mph speed limit.) It amazed us therefore to see this buck come down the slope of the yard across our street, then cross the street around 9 a.m. and continue downhill between our houses. Here’s a lower-resolution close-up from the photo above:
Eight points!. July 2025.
We lost sight of him for a minute, then my wife spotted him in the back corner of the neighbor’s yard. He was in no hurry. He’s eating some leaves there…
Eastern carpenter bee working the beebalm. June 2025.
I opened the month shooting photos of the beebalm with a swallowtail butterfly on it. This photo is from the same set. The swallowtails, bumblebees, and little tiny bees I haven’t identified yet all had to work around the behemoths of the flowers, the carpenter bees. At 1.25-1.50 inches (or more!) they pretty much go where they want to. Now the beebalm has slowly dropped all those fuchsia-colored petals. (Or are they petals? I don’t know much about plants.) All that remains are the ball in the center, still suspended on those long stems. Our new visitors love these: goldfinches. They flit from flower to flower, their nearly weightless bodies hardly making the stems bend at all. It seems too soon for seeds, but what do I know?
Summer temperatures, documented a few days back, will continue for the near term future. Americans look forward to celebrating Independence Day on Friday, the 249th of our country’s existence. In these muddled times, I wonder what that will bring. Meanwhile, the business of life marches on, from the mundane (it’s Gather the Garbage Day) to the inconvenient (workers coming to work on the leak in the bathroom shower) to the calm and simple (my wife returned from a coastal sojourn yesterday afternoon; this day will be our first together in a week).
I’m partially through my next installment about my father, Howard Bliss Pilcher, but it will not be published today. My goal is “every Sunday” but this week’s post is a sober and kinda negative thing about him. Regardless of how deserved that viewpoint may be, I want to pair it with another installment which is more upbeat and entertaining. Instead I offer this portrait of my father’s family from 1938. This photo was taken in Minnesota which makes it a year prior to the family’s move to Havre, MT. Based on family values, I’m estimating it would have been a formal thing around Easter because of the importance of that day for a minister. My father is nearing 13 if so, and I’m pretty sure my uncle will be 10 soon. My grandparents are in their early 40’s.
Left to right: The Rev. Howard “Bliss” Pilcher, sons Howard and Gordon, and Esther (Dahl) Pilcher. Edina, MN, 1938.
In the late 1960’s I listened to Barbra Streisand on a transistor radio the size of a cheap paperback. She sang “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.” I never understood that, emotionally at least. Intellectually I valued it and wanted to be one of those persons. I still do….but….
I don’t like people. There, it’s out. Liking people is inherent to my religious faith. We are supposed to like all people as caricatures of God, as images of God, or at the very least, as created beings who have as much claim to the Kingdom as anyone else. But…I do not gravitate toward people as an instinctive or cultured trait. I’ve known people who show themselves to be introverts, but they put on a social face, forcing themselves to reach out, building a practice that becomes instinctual. I’m not one of those, at least not in most milieus.
It’s more nuanced than it sounds. I like individual examples of “people” just not People in general and certainly not together in a group. Nothing tops my list of activities to be avoided like a cocktail party or “open house”. A group of people in a social situation where I know only one or maybe two of them makes me nervous, shuts me down, inspires my feet to start edging toward the exit, my lips mumbling an excuse to the host. Or that nervousness gets channeled into a babbling energy, creating The Entertainer—usually to my later embarrassment and dismay. After decades of experience with these situations—which mercifully I’ve kept to a limited number of occasions—I’ve learned some coping techniques. Mostly I avoid them unless I know a goodly handful of the people and like those who will be there. When I misjudge I desperately cast about for someone I know at least casually and bother them for as long as I can.
Oh boy, another wedding reception. Great for them, not so great for me.
I’ve learned how to maintain a veneer of sociability. I’m verbally talented after all. Talking to an individual about something they like makes you likeable. I’ve a wide range of interests and I’m well-read. I can usually relate to folks. But I’m uncomfortable.
Thankfully wedding receptions have beer, and this one had photogenic grounds to keep me away from all those people.
Perhaps this explains my delight in this blog, and in others’. We skip the social chit-chat on these things (usually). We do sometimes utter the banal (“I’m so happy for you” or “Getting that disease is so horrible!”), but mostly we utter honest statements because the beauty and scourge of the Internet lies in its anonymity for those who post. It’s why I’ve chosen to blog under my actual name. That seems contradictory, but it’s not. Most of you know my name, but you don’t actually know me except through these writings—the same way I know you only through what you post. Is it bold or stupid to put my own name? I’d prefer to think “honest” in that I will utter my opinions and not hide behind total anonymity. But y’all know me from a load of coal: except for two of you, and that has inhibited some of the things I would post, which illustrates the difference I’m talking about, this being known but anonymous simultaneously.
Where all of this blather leads turns out to be unexpected. I do need people, but just not the ones who mouth platitudes, clichés, and banal statements about the weather. Symbolic language has its place, but in a social setting it makes for a symbolic encounter signifying nothing. Sure, I can do it, but the sheer uselessness of it bothers me considerably. This need for people has been reinforced (again) by spending a week alone while my wife visits the NC coast with her friend. I’m reminded of living in my head like I did so many years. I believe we all need people to listen to us. That there are so many diaries and journals of people famous and otherwise reveals a deep need for others to understand what they’re going through. I guess I am a “people who need people” but only deep down and selfishly.
Needing and caring for people remains a distinct view of my religious faith. Listen to people with care. They need that. Yes. But so do I. The adroit, talented person knows when to listen and when to ask for a listener. I, however, refer you to the beginnings of this post. I do not possess those talents. I seek for listeners, but not to be the listener. Reminded again and again of my failure in the social arena, I withdraw. This is my learning path, perhaps one of several.
I uploaded a new gravatar photo just now. It’s bothered me that my it’s over 15 years old. I don’t believe in dissembling about oneself at least not unless it’s near-Machiavellian. If done at all, dissembling should be done consciously and with purpose.
Once upon a time, I had a full head of very nice-looking curly hair:
Me. Hair. Do not mention heavy-lidded look. It was 1979, okay? Monroe, WA, sometime in 1979.
It got a lot shorter through the years, but 25 years later it still had a couple inches of nice curliness. However…I started to notice a bit of thinning at the crown. “I’m not going to be one of those men who clings to the idea he has wonderfully bushy hair when it’s really thinning and fading away,” says I. My hairdresser cried when I told her to shave off all the curls. “I want to look like early Paul Simon.” (BTW, Paul, look at how good you looked in the late 60’s. Now look at your shaggy-but-not-in-a-good-way hair. Take a hint.) My hair reflects where I am on the journey of life. So too do my increasing folds of flabby skin, the creases in my face, and the sinking of my eyes into their sockets. I paid a lot of years to get to 71. I don’t intend to look 80, but I’m not shooting for 55 either. So there.
I thought to make an extended metaphor about how life resembled a track event or maybe cross-country, how most of us spend the first 18 years getting in shape. When the gun sounds at 18, though, I ran into trouble because not all of us have those lovely first splits where the race seems to be a breeze and you think you could run forever. By 21, when I envisioned the first little twinge of pain, I realized that many couldn’t say that—for them the race becomes an endless drudge to be run, not at the front of the pack, but at the end of that solid bunch of runners who know they’ll never come close to winning this thing. And then I saw it isn’t a race anyway, and the metaphor petered out. If I apply this metaphor to myself I…
changed my event almost as soon as I signed up for it…
sat out the second lap…
signed up for a different event and changed that one twice before quitting the race again…
entered the original event chosen by 17-year-old me…
ran that race until I realized I just wasn’t suited for it…
trained for a different event and ran that one for a decade…
left that race, dreaming of the Perfect Event…
and fell into a nondescript event only to find my innate talents bloom
And that’s just the metaphorical telling of my career. What about love? Family? The experience of life? No matter. It was fun playing with that photo of my brother running cross-country when we both were young and naïve.
Eastern carpenter bee on scarlet beebalm. June 2025.
For a good handful of years I fought a war against carpenter bees. These large bees (1.0-1.5 inches long) bored perfectly symmetrical holes in the decking of our house. First I attempted to plug all the holes with caulk, twigs, anything that came to hand. Then I bought horrendously over-priced traps, only one of which did its job and for only one year. This year I gave up, waved the white flag, said, “you win.” They are vigorous pollinators: that beebalm looks long past its prime, but they keep working the blossoms for that last speck of pollen. They’re only antagonistic to each other, although they’re scary in the spring: imagine a bee as big as your eye and flying right toward it. They still leave little piles of sawdust around my deck here and there in the spring.
And I still have the trap up. It’s a sign of self-respect. I don’t want to appear as if I’ve cravenly capitulated to them. Call it a fighting retreat.
all the voices in my head 