Several Band-Tailed pigeons were sitting in the half-dead Lodgepole Pine that commands our front yard. Oh, heck: the Lodgepole is the only tree in our yard. All the bird feeders hang from it’s lowest branches. The fungus that is slowly killing it is hidden deep in its heartwood and the birds don’t know it is dying.
Most of the pigeons flew off when I opened my car door.
“What happened to you?” I asked as I stood beneath the tree, looking up at her. I assume it is a ‘she’. She didn’t answer me.
There are some common misconceptions about Band-tailed Pigeons. They are not the same as “Rock-Doves” or the common Rock Pigeon. Those are the birds you see perched on public statues, along bridges and overpasses; pooping on everything; cooing and begging for crumbs in public parks; and generally making a pestilence of themselves.
Rock Pigeons are introduced from Europe, and like the rest of us former-Europeans, they have edged out the native birds. But the Band-tailed pigeon is a native bird. It is much shier than it’s city counter-part and a very nervous bird at the bird feeder.
One bird posts as a sentry while the rest vie for a place on the feeder.
Apparently this bird did not have a spotter and she tangled with a neighbor cat. I found feathers in and around the disputed territory of my bird bath in the front yard.
I think the cat did not know how big of a bird the pigeon was. She escaped, with a few ruffled feathers and a mild case of indignation.
I think I should name her “Fluffy”.
Days pass. Birds come and go. Cats drink out of the coveted bird bath. Birds continue to use it, too.
There were several Western Scrub Jays at play in the bath today, but this is the only one I captured. He was having too much fun.
Water droplets everywhere and not a care in the world!
Nothing like diving into the bath. This guy wants water everywhere.
He closes his eyes and takes a long sip of cool bath water: ahhhhh!
There were several poses like this: he’d pause, look around and try to identify where sounds were coming from (like the clicking of my shutter) or just to make certain no cats were sneaking up on him.
Speaking of cats.
This guy is either parked under my car or curled up under the hydrangea. He doesn’t live with the other cats that come into my yard: the black-and-white ones or the orange-and white one that cross the street to drink from the bird bath. This cat lives somewhere on the same block I live on.
“Excuse moi? I live here. You, human – and your pestilence of canines, are the guest. Capice?”
Yeah, I love this cat: he always looks at me like that and hes very slow to move when I walk toward him. He figures we’re the interlopers and this is his yard. (Yes, I know he is a tom. I have actually petted him.)
OK, they would be better if I had a spotting scope, but dang! I got some serious photos today.
I was sitting in the sunshine, letting the summer’s last rays warm my aching muscles. The birds were ten feet away, in the shade. I zoomed in on them, but I had sunglasses on and I can’t “see” what the zoom lens sees. I just had to hope that the lens did what it should do: collect all the light and focus on the subject.
I don’t have to wait for film to be developed (although sometimes I miss that step). I had “instant gratification” instead.
Song Sparrow in the bird bath. I called it a Fox Sparrow in FB but I think it is really a Song Sparrow.
Amanda gave me an HTML snippet to use to link to all the other participating sites, but I’ll be darned if I am just plain not Web-savvy. WordPress used to be a little friendlier to the HTML ignorant, but they have changed their format and I am a little lost. But if you go to Amanda’s blog, you can find links to all the other bloggers participating. Happy reading!
For one day, we want to drown out negativity and celebrate the beauty and pride of women.
These days it seems that some people want us to be ashamed of being women. They want us to believe that we’re less: less intelligent, less important, less human. There is so much negativity out there. For one day, we want to flood the internet with positive messages about women.
I thought this subject would come easily to me, but I am lost in the whispers of all the voices of all the beautiful women I have known, some of them lost forever and some of them still living, still encouraging, still fighting the good fight. Some of them live in my own head.
I have decided to share the stories of two women who live in my head.
Here, in my little studio at the top of the stairs, I have created some strong women creatures, Zith & Mitzi. As I worked with the wire and recycled materials that were their bones and clothes, they whispered their stories to me.
Mitzi.
She whispered of a hard life, a life that sapped away at everything she loved. She lived in the sagebrush land. She liked the desert and the desert creatures, and she could often be found sitting on a rock shaded by a quaking aspen tree, next to a trickle of water. In her youth, she was a beautiful faerie with delicate gossamer wings and flowing long hair. She faced no hardships and no long winters of the soul, only the hopeful days of youth.
But winter came to her. The darkness that creeps into our hearts as we age and as we face ferocious opponents took their toll on her beauty. She had her throat slit by barbed wire. An enemy took a swipe at her head with a hatchet. Age ravaged her skin. Her hair thinned and receded. Her wings were plucked during an escape from a predator. She lost her lover, her family, and most of her contemporaries.She battled illness and defeated it.
But through it all, Mitzi never lost her dignity and her soul. She reached into her heart to find strength she did not know was there. A deeply spiritual creature, Mitzi found faith to rise above her circumstances.
Zith.
She is a Woodland Elf, just under 2′ tall. She strides through the woods and meadows with a purpose, silent as a hunter (she is a huntress). She is bold, outrageous, out-going. She is never at a loss for the right words and her heart beats with compassion for the down-trodden.
Confronted by an enemy or a bully, Zith is a fearsome adversary. She will not back down. Zith knows her heart. Zhe is compassionate and passionate, strong-willed and determined.
She is also wounded and broken. The walking staff is a cane. She has a gimpy left arm that she must use to support herself. Still, she takes long strides and rarely pauses for a rest. Rest is for another time. Rest is for when there are no longer hungry mouths to feed and injustices to battle. Rest is for someone else.
Zith and Mitzi. They aren’t living and breathing as we know living and breathing, but they are alive. As my hands formed them, women from my past whispered bits of their stories into my ears and the models became symbols for living women. They carry the spirits of many women in their hearts of recycled wire and cloth, dryer lint and silk fabric.
Isn’t that what we all are, anyway?
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Now go read Amanda‘s post. At the bottom of her post is a link to all of the other bloggers participating today. Maybe you will decide to join us and write something positive about women. If you do, add your link to Amanda’s linky on the bottom of her page. Or go like Celebrating Womanhood on Facebook.
This is mostly about wildlife in the backyard, but there might be some mechanical devices involved as well.
Today was a good day, mostly pain-free and very lazy. I am considering the comments made on my last post very seriously, but I have other things to do before I go asking a doctor for a dx of fibromyalgia. I do take it seriously: three friends in one week said the same thing after I whined to them about how I was feeling. I just hadn’t seriously considered it before because… well, I never thought my symptoms matched up properly.
But that isn’t what I wanted to write about tonight. We have a backyard full of wild creatures and I would love to share them with you, my small following of friends and family.
Unfortunately, I don’t have photos of everything.
For instance, a couple weeks ago my husband called me at 6:30AM. “Is the opossum still there?”
Um. What opossum would that be?
My husband lets his dog out very early in the morning, like about 4:30AM. And on this particular morning, Murphy proudly carried a dead opossum to the back door. Don chased him down in the yard and made him leave the poor body out in front of the shed. And now, at 6:30AM when it was light out, he wanted me to go out and see if the opossum was truly dead.
I assured him there was no body in the back yard.
Dumb dog! The opossum went into a stupor and “played” dead, and Murphy thought he had a prize. I’m sure it was very relieved to wake up from it’s self-induced coma to find it was still alive, and it made it out of the yard post-haste.
Last Monday, Don let his dog out at 4:30AM. And there was a terrible ruckus in the back corner of the yard, with barking and growling and scuffling. I woke up and held my breath, waiting to hear a cat scream. No cat. Whatever it was, it fought back and held Murphy at bay before it jumped onto the compost bin and over the 6′ bamboo screen, onto the neighbor’s little tin shed.
I moved all the hazelnut mulch bags into the backyard and stacked them onto the back stoop until I can find time to spread the nuts. I did this because something moved the bags around in the driveway and attempted to chew through thee plastic fiber.
Last week, I stepped out the back door in the early morning to discover the bags that were still unopened had been rearranged on the back stoop.
The critter left his mark.
Pretty certain that is the same critter that Murphy tangled with a few mornings earlier. I’d just spread hazelnuts over the flower beds in the back corner. Apparently we have a neighboring raccoon who is fond of filberts.
Darn thing also dug up my freshly planted mums and killed them. Guess it was also hunting grubs??
Today, I lazed around. I pulled out the lawn chair, set my camera on the bench beside me with a glass of ice water for refreshment, and opened the last book in the Cornelia Funke series I have been reading (Inkheart, Inkspell & Inkdeath). I kept one eye on the new birdbath.
I purchased the salad bowl at Goodwill and filled it with water. The stand is one I bought at a yard sale not too long ago. I also added a “bubbler” to make the water move and I have since moved the entire set-up to a different location. It has taken the small birds about a month to discover it, but now that they have – they love it.
But before I spotted any birds in the birdbath, there was a chattering and commotion in the hazelnut tree that my husband has allowed to grow wild along the back fence. It’s in a part of the yard where we have done no landscaping. Neglected, wild, and overgrown. And now there was a squirrel chattering back there, presumably at Harvey as he wandered the perimeter of the yard.
Harvey is hunting cats and doesn’t care about squirrels.
Harvey is not especially bright and he’s on a mission to get out of our yard to hunt cats.
I grabbed my camera and headed to the wild side of the yard.
The squirrel was upset with this large blue bird, not Harvey. The Steller’s Jay was working the hazelnut tree over.
Steller’s Jays are harder to capture than scrubjays. They aren’t as gregarious. But they are one of the most beautiful birds I have ever seen. I think they are prettier than the Eastern Bluejay.
The squirrel is a young Eastern Fox squirrel that only recently started coming over to our bird feeder. It seems he (or she) has also discovered the wild hazelnut in back.
The birdbath didn’t disappoint me. You can see the bubbler in the middle of the bowl there: it’s powered by two “D” batteries and just spins, making the water move. I was worried that it would put off the little birds, but this red-breasted nuthatch doesn’t seem to be bothered by it.
The Black-capped Chickadee was more worried about me and I was sitting 20 feet away.
We live along the Pacific Flyway, the major north-south migration route for thousands of birds annually. Our back yard is also on the flight path for airliners coming from the south, headed for PDX. We are also relatively close to several small airports and since we sit on the bluff over the Willamette River, we have some great thermals overhead. Small aircraft often buzz the house in the summer months.
Today, we were buzzed by three Vintage WWII airplanes. They’re noisy, but they don’t leave large bird droppings like the occasional Turkey Vultures that gets lost on the thermals overhead do.
The chickadee started to warm up to my presence. Or maybe this is a different bird.
The sun was dropping low and the shadows were getting long when I decided it was time to come in and fix dinner for my husband. But I couldn’t resist the squash bug. Pestilence.
It has been something of a frustrating weekend for me. I have these strange episodes where all my muscles just ache and I can’t find any energy to do anything and I end up doing very little physically. I happen to be in the middle of one of those episodes and it is extremely frustrating. The weather is nice and I want to get my garden winterized.
Or go hiking with my husband.
But instead of doing either, I curled up in the recliner for most of the weekend and read a book.
A good book, mind you, but all the same… I am frustrated by the tenderness and ache in all my muscles.
Harvey is frustrated with it, too. I took him for a walk every morning of the weekend and I kept my promise to him that each walk would be at least a mile long, but a mile isn’t long enough to wear him out and make him a tired but happy doggie.
He has this doggie dream of breaking into the area where we (normally) have a vegetable garden. He wants to catch the cats that he thinks hide in there. He wants to finish tearing off the boards on the fence and escaping. He wants to Run Free.
(what movie does that remind you of? Or, worse – what song from 6th Grade Choir does that remind you of?) (The latter question only applies to people of my age)
(Hint: it has to do with a lioness.)
Have news for Harvey: we have begun the process of rebuilding the Fence That Harvey Ate. It cost us $83.00, so far. I think it will stay under $100.00, but the point is… Harvey is not allowed into the veggie garden area.
Neither is Murphy, but he doesn’t sit and pine away along the fence like Harvey does.
I asked Harvey today what was the matter. Don’t we love him enough? Isn’t he happy here? Why does he always want to run away?
Last week he escaped again. I was struggling with the lawn debris container and the front gate. Harvey slipped between us and into freedom. There was a split second where my heart sank, I quit breathing, and a decision. I knelt down and commanded in my loudest voice (which is never very loud because I have an irritatingly small voice), “Harvey! Here!”
And there was a split second where Harvey vacillated between the Call of the Wild and his conditioning to Come when his owner kneels and points down at the ground with the word, “HERE!”
He came to me and I grabbed his collar. I praised him up one side and down the other, but I could see that he regretted his decision as soon as he was captured.
All I knew was that if he had gone, I would have let him. I hurt too much to give chase.
I am tired of hurting.
If this episode follows the cycle of episodes like it, in two weeks, I will feel fine. No aches, no pain, and lots of energy. In the meantime, I am down to just plain feeling like crud.
In good news: once it gets dark outside, Harvey just wants to stay home. I think he’s afraid of the dark.
August’s Blue Moon. I really lucked out: usually the moon is too bright and the digital camera doesn’t want to focus on the image, leaving me with a huge blurry light in the center of the photo. But there was just enough cloud cover to create a natural filter, and I walked away with three nice photos of the full moon on August 31.
I have spent half the summer trying to get a decent photo of one or another of the several hummingbirds I have finally coerced into my garden. This is one of my favorites. (Female Anna’s Hummingbird)
I can’t tell you how many missed opportunities I’ve had because the darn hummers seem to know when I am sitting in wait with a camera vs. when I am just sitting out in the yard. When I have no camera, the birds are plentiful and friendly, but when I have the camera – they all but disappear!
The male Anna’s Hummingbird. Different day.
I am thinking of putting up a sign next to the bird bath:
Jaci’s Bird & Cat Spa
Birds – free
Cats – $0.25
I doubt it will keep the cats away, but it would be funny.
I do not know what kind of fly this is. It is a fly: two wings. Diptera. My husband suggested it might be a Bot Fly (ewwwww) but I couldn’t find any matching images on the all-powerful Internet (which is not all-powerful but has more images for flies than my Field Guide to Insects by Audobon). It was a large fly: 3/4″ long. Almost as large as a small horsefly and not quite as large as a deer fly. I would have squashed it if it had been a horse or deer fly. They hurt!!
There’s a term for pieces of driftwood that resemble something living, but I cannot remember what the term is. That’s my “squirrel” piece of wood behind the white Chrysanthemum.
What to do with a rotting old stool. Support a Hollyhock, of course!
Why is there an oak tree growing in my lawn? Why is there an oak tree growing anywhere in my yard? I used to blame it on squirrels but I have caught the Scrub jay red-handed with a filbert in it’s beak. I have filbert trees in my yard, too, but we encourage those. The oak must go (although, I confess, it would be a pretty tree…)
Just takes a life time to grow.
(That was a stupid sentence and I know it: of course it takes a life time. The oak’s life time. What I meant was: it takes longer for the oak tree to grow than I have to wait for it to grow.)
Besides, Don will mow over it.
Bags of Hazelnut mulch waiting to be opened and spread around my garden.
Did you happen to notice that I used the term “filbert” and “hazelnut” in the same post? They were Filberts when I was a kid. Somewhere along the line, they became Hazelnuts. We made up a story about that: Filbert died, and Hazel inherited the orchard. So what used to be Filbert’s is now Hazel’s.
Sort of like “The Legend of Falling Rock.” The Legend of Falling Rock is by no means limited to West Virginia mythology: his signs are all over the West, too: “Watch for Falling Rock”, “Fallen Rock”, “Rocks on Road”. My little sister, my older brother and I spent hours in the back seat of the car spinning yarns about Fallen Rock as we traveled on vacations. But our dad always had the best versions.
Honey bees on the Sedum.
I’d love to know whose backyard honey bee hive we contribute pollen to. They should give us free honey for taking care of their honey bees. That’s what I think.
A beautiful anenome. I am so amazed! When I first planted anenomes in our yard, Murphy – the puppy, then – followed me around and dug them all up and ate them. They did not kill him, but I wanted to. This year, I planted a bunch and every single one of them came up and bloomed and thrived.
Murphy must be a wiser dog.
I am so fascinated with the dozens of bees, hover flies and bee flies in our yard! I sneaked up on this drone and started snapping away (digital photography – setting on “Sports” to capture the bees as they moved from flower to flower since the stupid camera argues with me over F-stops and film speed).
And this was a totally accidental capture: the bee on the move! You can see it’s trajectory and the stop-motion as it turned and faced the lens with a little frowning face.
Other than I am going to post a photo I took of the second August full moon, this post probably has nothing to do with blue moons.
Well, other than it was one of my mother’s favorite expressions. She usually said it with an expletive or two thrown in, as in “God-dammit, my dog runs away once in a blue moon and the neighbor is calling the cops?” (She really said that once. She had the leash in her hand and she was headed out the door to retrieve Mr. Tack – aka “Tacky” – from someone’s front yard. I really felt sorry for whatever neighbor it was who threatened to call the cops because you did not ever want to cross my mom. Never.)
My mom very rarely got angry. That was my dad’s job. But when my mom did get angry, everyone within reach blanched and the whole world seemed to suck in its breath.
Except when she was mad at my father. Then she just left the house with car keys in her hand and went out on some back road where she could push the car to it’s limit. It’s been told that she pushed the Dodge station wagon up to 120 miles per hour. I have no idea why she was mad at Dad that night but speed helped her calm down and she returned home a much calmer woman than when she left the house.
I never saw or heard my parents fight. The first clue I had of a disagreement between them was when she walked out the door, alone, with the car keys and the tires on whatever car we owned squealed a little as she pulled out of the driveway.
But I did see my mother angry a time or two.
My most vivid memory of her being angry was set in the sand dunes north of Winnemucca, Nevada. We were part of a four-wheel drive club that hosted sand races. The dunes north of Winnemucca are reminiscent of the Sahara or some exotic place: white-hot sand rising in dunes and dropping off suddenly, fluctuating in the winds, pushing the sagebrush and cheat grass back, always changing, moving, shifting.
There were designated areas for the dune buggies and jeeps that came to compete, and a designated safe place for small children to play in the sand. We checked our tennis shoes for scorpions before we put them back on. We got sun-burned and we ran like wild horses between “our” dune and the concessions stand where our mothers alternated their volunteer time. That was a big old school bus converted into a concession bus.
What I remember of the moment was that I was not on the designated dune, but was somewhere between the concessions stand and the kids’ dune and the area where the rigs were prepped and raced. I didn’t really care much for the races, I just wanted to be a wild horse.
My brother, however, was in the middle of the oil and grease and gears and exhaust and roar of engines. My dad raced. And my sister was too little still to care, so she played on the dune with the rest of the little kids who didn’t care.
Enter the laws of physics and a negligent (and most likely drunk) driver. There were no DUI laws in place in those days that put blood-alcohol limits at .08. Driving drunk was… common. Unregulated, for the most part.
This driver had a passenger. She was one of the mothers of the young kids playing on the hill and one of the mothers who volunteered in the concessions stand.
They drove up the sand dune where the kids were playing and they turned broadside to the kids as they attempted to arc around the kids and on over to the racing area. The problem with this is: the hill was steep. Dune buggies and jeeps roll over. They were broadside to a number of small and clueless children. And they stalled.
And my mother saw them. While everyone else who was looking on sucked in their breath and hoped against hope that the dune buggy would not roll and crush the children below, my mother was hot-footing it from the concession stand to a position between said children and the stalled rig. She moved so fast that no one actually saw her move from the stand to the spot on the dune below the rig, but everyone – I mean EVERYONE – heard her.
She was 5’1″ and weighed 95 pounds. The kids on the sand dune scattered. The driver in the stalled vehicle might have opened his mouth to protest or argue with my mom, but she had the upper hand. And she reamed him out. And his passenger. When she was finished with her verbal assault on their lack of intelligence, common sense, and his driving skills, even the racers on the track had stopped to listen. The jack rabbits, scorpions, rattlesnakes and horned toads pulled their heads back into their shady places and blinked out at this tiny woman in red-and-white striped capris pants in fear. The vultures cleared the heavens.
It was the most awesome, wonderful, powerful display of grizzly bear mama on the sand dunes in the late 1960’s.
It was a once-in-a-blue-moon show of righteous anger and everyone ducked. And when she was finished, the spectators applauded. The jerk that was stuck on the hill meekly backed back down. He didn’t have it in him to argue with the 5’1″ woman who just charged up the hill faster than Superwoman could fly.
So when my mom headed out the door with Tacky’s leash in her hand, swearing at the neighbor who was upset that the stupid Schnauzer had just planted some brown logs on his lawn… well, I stayed home. I didn’t want to see (or hear) what my mother was going to unleash on the neighbor.
After all, Tacky only escaped once in a Blue Moon.
Me? I went to the Oregon State Fair on Saturday. I wanted to just go to the fair and see the animals and exhibits, but my husband zeroed in on the fact that his hero, Joe Walsh, was performing Saturday night. He has a channel on Pandora that is titled “Joe Walsh Radio”. Not that I am complaining – they play a lot of Led Zeppelin on Joe Walsh Radio on Pandora. If I had been the one to set up the station, it would have been Led Zeppelin Radio.
I have Third Day Radio set up on there, too. But I’m the only one who listens to that & I do it when I’m cleaning house.
If I want folk music, I tune into www.folkalley.com because Pandora doesn’t “do” folk or bluegrass.
Anyway, back to what I have been up to. Before I knew it, Don had purchased tickets to Joe Walsh on Saturday at the State Fair. And then he seemed quite surprised that I actually wanted to go to the State Fair and check out the exhibits, too. Silly husband: there are horses at the State Fair!
Not any horse this year, but I noted that there were Gypsy horses and I have recently fallen in love with the breed. I just wanted to see them up close and all.
So we headed down to Salem at 3:00PM, thinking that we’d have about 3 hours to tour the fairgrounds before we had to find our way into the amphitheatre for the all-important Joe Walsh concert. I got to drive. Lucky me. Don is familiar with Salem and I am not. Fortunately, it was very simple, he’s a good so-pilot and the directions to the fairgrounds were well-marked. Parking was free.
Before we even got into the fair, things hinted at a sour day. And I am afraid that I fed into it. Something came over me: righteous anger, indignation, stupidity – I don’t know what. But there were three young men walking ahead of us, big burly youths between 17 and 19 years of age. The tallest and burliest was a strawberry-blond of some indistinct Nordic heritage with a very foul mouth. There were families with small children streaming along the same path; people of every color : pasty white, tan, brown, ecru, burnt sienna, chocolate, coffee. And this ignoramus has the bravado to call someone a “Nigger”.
If his skin had been black, I suppose I would have ignored it. but his skin was pasty-white and his companions were ecru. He didn’t mean the word in vernacular of good friends chiding each other: he meant it in the most derogatory terms. His voice dripped with hatred.
I muttered (loudly) to Don, “That is an inappropriate comment.”
Any swearing of that nature is inappropriate in a crowd, I don’t care what epithets you choose to use. Common sense should tell you that.
Red-head pretended he didn’t hear me and shot back some further derogatory description of people with skin of a different color than his. We were now entering the queue at the gate.
“Your ignorance shows on your face,” I replied – directly, this time because in my opinion the lines were drawn and Mr. 250-pounds of weight lifting anger had crossed a line that Ms. 135-pounds of flabby butter could not, in all good conscience, allow him to cross. My pasty-white flesh rose up.
To everyone’s relief, the three hoods left the queue and stomped silently away, completely (and hopefully, truly) abashed. I can’t stand bullies.
I apologized later to my husband who was just trying to keep his head down as the shots were fired.
It was stupid, I know – but if no one stands up, then who wins? Stupid wins. And I just can’t let stupid win.
I let it go. I wanted to have a great day, so I let it go. They left, everyone in the line let out a collective sigh (actually, I don’t think anyone was listening in, but that sounded good – didn’t it?), and we hustled right through with our tickets purchased online.
The Fair. Well, in a nutshell: the horses are inaccessible for the most part. A few are stalled where the normal fair goer can walk through, but most are kept in stalls beyond the chain-link fence around the fair grounds. How I had forgotten that detail is beyond me. DANG!
The only way to see the horses at Oregon State Fair is to attend the horse show in the arena. What horses you get to see depends on when you are there and the schedule. We got to watch four young horses vie for a ribbon in carriage pulling. I can only tell you that one was an Arabian, one was a draft horse of indeterminate breeding, and two were sharp-looking sorrel horses that could have been anything hot-blooded. The announcer never mentioned breeds.
There was a draft horse competition at 7PM, but we were headed to the concert by then. We did get to see several Clydesdale and Shire horses, but that was about it.
The cattle, sheep, goats and pigs filled a small building. There are more on display at any Clackamas County Fair. I suppose only the best of the best FFA and 4-H animals make it to the State Fair, but it just seems like there are too few when you’ve browsed the stalls at our local county fair for years.
We went looking for the 4-H exhibits and the General Exhibits. The guide to the Fair was ambiguous. The map wasn’t oriented to the North. The graphics did not outline all the entrances. We found all the commercial vendors trying to hawk their newest and bestest wares (stuff you can’t live without, you know), the Master Gardener’s display (banana trees outside? That’s pretty far-fetched in Oregon, even if we’re in a moderate climate), the bare and small 4-H exhibit, and, finally, a small corner at the very outer limits of the fair called the “Artisan’s Village” where local, home-grown Oregon artists demonstrated their trade and their wares. One blacksmith, one wood-carver, a couple potters, a couple jewelry makers…
We found the steam engines and the old car and jeep. We walked briskly through the extended tents of Midway traders selling cheap clothes, jewelry and miscellany made in China, Taiwan, Korea – anywhere but in Oregon. We braved a walk through the commercial exhibits (I pulled Don away from some hawker selling a grill cover you can fry eggs on). And we finally located the main exhibition hall only to realize we’d been there once.
The photography was great. Everything else was displayed county-by-county, presumably to give you an idea of what each county in Oregon is able to produce.
The preserves (canned goods) filled a 4×4′ table. All the jams, pickles, fruits, et cetera from across the entire state: one table top 4×4′. The quilts lined the walls, but I do not recall seeing any identifying tags hanging from them to tell you who/what/where.
Don asked if we could go see the poultry. YES! Certainly there would be a lot of birds! There’s an entire building set aside for birds.
Um. Yeah. Not. I figure – off the top of my head – that there were 40 birds. 12 bunnies. WOW. When I think of trying to make my way through the cages at the local county fair and all the variety of chickens… This was pitiful.
We watched the judging of a beef class (Red Angus). There was no announcer and you had to have some knowledge of agriculture to understand what they were doing. It was really very different from the fairs I have attended before where the beef was open applauded, lauded, and auctioned off to a local grocer or butcher. I’m not going to go into the ethics of raising beef for food (I am not vegan or vegetarian – I am an unashamed omnivore who likes red meat – sorry & yet I understand your position: is that OK?).
We finally found our way into the amphitheatre despite the looks on the faces of the people working the fair. We had a map. the map showed the entrances in different places than where we were directed. We downloaded the map from the Oregon State Fair web site. It was the worst map ever. Well, close. Someone needs to inform the map makers for the State Fair that ALL maps should be oriented to the North and that gates/entrances/exits should be *clearly* marked.
We were still in a very good mood, despite everything I have written. We found our seats in the upper tier. Not many people were seated around us. The grey-haired men who came to take their places around us were giddy with anticipation: the last time they saw Joe Walsh was in 1971. Over forty years ago. Don was in Junior High, so these men were older than him.
And Joe Walsh, that 64-year-old rocker?
He rocked. He rolled. He engaged the audience. He put on a show. He proved that he remains one of the best guitarists of our generation. And the audience sang all of his golden oldies with him.
Thank you, Joe Walsh, for a good show.
You pick. I can’t. It was all good, even if you are sick and tired of Life’s Been Good to Me… It brought the house down.
This was a lazy weekend. It was not so much by choice, but by a simple lack of water.
I woke up Saturday morning with foot cramps. Foot cramps became leg cramps throughout the morning. I realized rather quickly that it was more than likely a simple case of dehydration. Except it wasn’t that simple: by mid-afternoon, my legs were still occasionally cramping despite the copious amount of water I drank throughout the day. I added lemonade and juice to my regime, swallowed potassium and magnesium supplements and by eventide the cramping had abated.
This morning I went out and bought some Gatorade (which I detest) in an effort to replace the electrolytes my body was missing. Usually I can get that with lemonade but since I was so stupid as to let myself become severely dehydrated, I needed an extra boost. Today was much the same: taking in copious amounts of water and supplementing my normally healthy diet with minerals like potassium and magnesium. The spasms died off Saturday afternoon late, but I don’t want to take a chance of returning to that miserable place any time soon.
It was too uncomfortable to try to do anything: if I paused or knelt, some muscle in one or both legs would scream out for hydration. If I rested, the cramping would come on suddenly and I’d have to be up, walking. Flexing the muscles is the only way out of a cramp and walking was the only effective way to flex the muscles.
Since I was otherwise occupied in nervous movement, I was not very effective as a house cleaner or gardener. That isn’t to say I was completely lazy: I did the minimum work in the house and I managed to get most of the front yard whipped into shape and I read a lot. I finished one book and started the sequel.
And I drank a lot of healthy fluids.
I sat outside in the shade and read when I wasn’t flexing my muscles to fight off the constant cramping.
The Anna’s hummingbirds paid me several visits, often hovering six feet away from my face with their heads tipped slightly: “Who are you and why are you sitting in my garden?” Of course I never had my camera handy when they paused to ask me that question.
Once I looked up from my book and saw the female Anna’s hovering a few feet from Harvey’s nose: “Are you dangerous? Will you chase me? Is it safe to hover in the flowers by you?” Harvey answered with a blink.
The Anna’s love my hummingbird feeders, but they also love the flowers currently in bloom in my yard.
The cerinthe retorta (above) and the salvia “hot lips” are both big hits with the hummers, along with the fading Russian sage and the gladiolas. I’m very happy the hummers are happy.
The bees are happy, too. I think I have mentioned it here before, but we love bees. All kinds of bees: mason bees, sweat bees, honey bees, bumble bees and all the bees no one ever notices in their yard. Wasps are tolerated as well (except I am not too fond of yellowjackets in August). Hornets can be tolerated as long as their nest is in someone else’s yard. We usually have a dozen mud-daubers hovering around the garage, but I haven’t seen them this summer.
There are so many kinds of bumblebees. They are not usually very shy, either. This one stayed where he was on the fading blossoms of oregano for several photos. He was a small bumblebee and pale yellow. Just look at his eyes! he seems to be taking in the camera as much as it is taking him in.
In the limited space allotted to Bees, Wasps, and Kin in the Audubon Field Guide to Insects of North America, I think this might be a “Digger Wasp” but I can’t be certain because the definition of their territory is more southern. Whatever it is, it loves the Pearly Everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea) that I transplanted to my garden from the mountains. Pearly Everlasting is a favorite flower of mine, too. The wasp is not an aggressive wasp but is certainly a bright color addition.
I like this black-and-white striped bee.
Honey bees are not native to the North Americas. They were introduced by homesick Europeans – one of the few invasive species that have done us a good turn rather than a bad turn. I would love to know where the hive is: which park? There’s one to the east of us, one to the south of us, and a wild one to the north of us. Or is there a bee-keeper in the neighborhood?
I don’t know if this is the same black-and-white bee as in the former photo. I don’t think so: I think this one is a larger bee. But I could be very wrong.
In other random garden news, I paid $35 for this. I did not splurge on it, but gave it a lot of thought. I saw several interesting wind chimes by this artist at the Oregon City Farmer’s Market a couple weeks ago. She had a sign posted on her booth:
Sure, you can make it yourself. But be honest: you won’t. But I will.
I thought about that for two weeks. I would make it myself. But in the interest of helping a fellow artist along, I decided to buy a wind chime from her.
And promptly lost her business card. But if you live near Oregon City, just go to the Farmer’s Market. She’ll be there.
I bought this from my cousin at last year’s Family Reunion. She bought it somewhere and regifted it at the reunion. I would have a hard time putting all that flatware out in my yard except some other artist drilled it, hung it, soldered it and created art out of it.
But I have no problem with china.
I do not usually get a photo of this. Don asked me about it the other night: did I ever see bees on it?
No, because it is only open when it is night or heavily overcast. It’s an Evening Primrose. I do not know how it came to be in my yard – I didn’t plant it – but I am not going to weed it back out now that it has drifted here. I remember the Evening Primroses from my childhood in Nevada, bright stars of color in the fading sunlight.
I have seen moths gathering around it. In Nevada, we often caught Hummingbird moths by the Evening Primroses.
Have I mentioned that we did not plant a vegetable garden this year? It was too cold and wet for the months when we should have been planting and then we were off on vacation. So I was surprised to find this volunteer in my back shade garden. And look: now I even have a couple small tomatoes! Wonder if they’ll ripen or not?
I almost forgot to share this! The neighborhood cats have discovered that there is a fresh source of water in our front yard. Apparently their owners do not set out water dishes for them and so they find our birdbath a welcome addition. Hmmm – the guilty owner is even in the background! One of four of their cats can be found in our birdbath at different times.
Of course, if she has water in a dish for her cats, I apologize. But by the frequency in which I find cats in the bird bath, I doubt it. I do not go out of my way to chase the thirsty animals off but they are afraid of me and run, anyway.
Speaking of bird baths… this is what Donald convinced me we needed to do with my wrought-iron planter: a bird bath in the back yard for the small birds. The ceramic dish was a Goodwill purchase.
My buddy. Despite the dehydration and cramps, we went on two walks this weekend and we hung out in the back yard together. I even took him out into the front yard for awhile when I was cleaning out from under the rhododendrons.
Remember those neighbor cats? Well, one came around the corner of the fence, unprepared to meet a big dog in the front yard. And Harvey? Harvey managed to flip himself over when he hit the end of the tether I had him on. It was actually rather funny, but I expect he wasn’t amused.
This morning when I put the dogs out, I noticed the moon.
I wondered what planet was up so early on an August morning. And I ran inside to fetch my camera in the hopes I could capture the elusive moon.
I have been thinking a lot about creativity lately. I have been in a creative slump. Unfinished oil paintings sit on my easels. I haven’t sketched in ages. I found ink pen nibs in a business card holder on my desk and thought about the last time I used them.
It was a very long time ago.
Drawing is like a best friend. You can spend years apart but when you meet up again, you pick up the friendship right where you left, as if time had never intervened.
The only creative thing that I have done in recent months has been to experiment with glues and ceramics.
But this post is not about the success (or lack thereof) that I had with different ceramic glues ad the weather.
It is about the stirring in my heart and soul that draws me back to the roots of who I am. Who I was created to be.
I set myself aside for so many years that I hardly remember who I used to be or who I wanted to be. I do not regret that: my children were the greatest part of my life and I miss them horridly now that they have grown and are forging their own lives far away and without me. That is as it should be: the sacrifice, the growing apart, the mourning.
I am suddenly in a place where I can rekindle my dreams.
I find myself walking down the halls at work and admiring the lighting. It casts strange shadows on the walls and I imagine myself as a little girl trying to walk with the light: stretching up when it reaches for the ceiling and squatting down to walk under the shadows where the light fades and back up again.
I find myself staring out at the trees and seeing a green dragon curled up on the limbs, blinking its warm golden eyes and me before smiling and disappearing into the leaves.
I remember the girl who danced in the rain. That was in a place where rain – and warm rain, especially – was an oddity. Barefoot on warm asphalt, in jeans and a smock top, but my memory makes it a white cotton dress that billows around me as I twirl to some unheard song in the background. And laughing, I look up to see my parents in the front door watching me, slightly amused.
It’s a favorite memory.
At Faerieworlds, I felt myself begin to tap into something I had not sensed in a very long time. Something primal that I had buried under a lot of adult rules and mores about growing up. It teased at me, like the out-going tide. And I knew if I waded out too far, it would carry me off like the rip tide and I would be helpless against its flow.
I resisted.
Why did I resist? Because I am an adult? Because I am a Christian and the images I see in my head are not exactly outlined in the Bible, and being so cannot be from God? Isn’t the litmus test whether or not they do harm, not whether or not the Church approves?
The Church painted clothes on Michelangelo’s masterpieces on the ceilings of a number of churches, including the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo did not clothe his images. I believe to this day that the artist heard from God; the Church heard from Man.
But that little political rant aside, I have been trying to listen to that voice. The voice of the muse.
And little images have begun to float in my mind. Projects. Ideas.
Colors.
Tonight, I saw a vivid arrangement of colors in my mind’s eye, stuck in traffic on I-205 and trying to stay in the moment so I didn’t drive into someone’s bumper. I saw a vivid blue back ground and an open hand. Millions of lights flashed out of the hand, like seeds being sown. I saw a painting I did a very long time ago on a trunk that has since been destroyed and I knew that I needed to return to that moment, to that person, to that art.
I allowed the trunk to be destroyed in a bizarre moment of conformity.
God did not create me to conform. He created me to create.
And as I turned the last corner before pulling into my drive tonight, this song came on the radio. I don’t even particularly like Aerosmith, but this song is timeless.
Jaci Dawn 