Looks like food.
Smells like food.
Could be food.
[First posted: October 4, 2014]
Foxglove Moments
Foxglove is the name of my property, five acres overlooking the Lewis River Valley that was covered with the wildflower when I first moved here in 1996.
Beyond gratitude...
Just when I was slumping into the gray and rainy drears
of a Pacific Northwest autumn,
bemoaning the lack of color,
this little fellow appeared at my study window,
cheering me up immensely.
[First posted: November 8, 2014]
I feel the year winding down around me.
Driving home through leaf blizzards;
last mowing for this year,
with a grasshopper escort no less;
morning walks, crunching through brown, wrinkled leaves;
squirrels watch from a high branch,
wishing to raise the issue of a certain bird feeder in need of refilling...
[First posted: October 2014]
Wrote Robert Frost:
"Leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay."
Autumn reminds us:
Nothing can stay.
Fewer and fewer come by now
each day.
I see them packing their bags,
Listen to them making their plans,
complaining about the long flight south (Flying is such a hassle.)
I'm missing them already.
Bye, Rufus!
Today I encountered a spider with an intricate, exquisite mandala on its back,
like a Tibetan sand painting suspended in mid-air,
and serving much the same purpose:
to wonder at,
to meditate on,
to enter into 
and merge with its beauty and mystery,
until everything in the world vanishes,
except Beauty and Mystery.
[First posted: October 7, 2013]
On certain days,
at a certain time in the late afternoon,
the rhododendrons on this hillside begin to glow,
as if they'd been turned on
at some central switch,
as if radiating some ethereal inner light.
[First posted: June 27, 2014]
This bird feeder is squirrel-proof, the feed store owner told me, due to its ingenious design. Nowhere for the little critters to get a hold.
So I brought it home, optimistically filled it with seed, and hung it up.
It took my squirrels less than a day to figure out how to un-proof it.
Returning home in the evening to a near-empty feeder, I doubted that the birds could have eaten that much so soon.
As I watched, the culprit appeared--looking decidedly more portly than the day before--to finish off the last bit of seed.
I realize I could wire it so the feeder hangs lower and farther beyond their stretch, but for the moment it makes me kind of proud that I have squirrels with superior problem-solving abilities.
[First posted: June 24, 2014]
Summer returned to this hillside yesterday, surging up the river valley like a great green tidal wave.
I worked outside most of the day, mostly pruning rhododendrons, then in late afternoon threw a small welcome-back party, just myself, a doe, a couple of squirrels, the chipmunk, and 20 or so hummingbirds--with all their zipping about, it's impossible to keep count. The raccoons sent their regrets--they were traveling.
An eagle staged a fly-over to mark the occasion, as I sat under the broad-leaf maple, sun winking through the leaves, and enjoyed a simple repast of pita bread, hummus and olives, while listening to Beethoven's Pastoral.
A quiet, quite perfect solstice celebration...
Summer, we missed you.
[First posted: June 22, 2014]
