Monthly Archives: October, 2009
Close encounters of the arachnid kind or, an arachnomania moment.
Yesterday, as I cleaned off the plant shelves in the kitchen I encountered a black widow web near the window. I moved a painted decorative grasshopper candle-holder, and found the usual dust motes and dead bugs, but didn’t see the spider. So I carted the votive holder to the sink, placed it there to be [...]
Haiku: Unshaded light bulb
Over shoulder ~ un- shaded light bulb glare. I write haiku in the night.
Solar clothes dryers
We’ve gotten our first rains and I’m reminded that I won’t be able to use my solar clothes dryer (aka clothesline) so often as we progress into winter. I love the loofa scrub I get from the sun-scented towels. I’ve used a clothesline to dry laundry off and on all my life. For many of [...]
Stewardship—again.
I’ve been thinking a lot about NASA’s “mission to bomb the moon” and our woeful lack of healthy stewardship of the Earth. What makes us so arrogant as a species, to believe that we are pursuing a “new frontier” by being destructive to another celestial body? I read that the United States is trying to [...]
Stewardship
Our stewardship of this world is the hope of generations to come. If we aren’t good stewards, our grandchildren and their children, will have no natural areas to take their children or places to observe the bigger picture of life’s cycles or the birds and beasties that share our world. The natural world is the [...]
White-crowned sparrow
The white-crowned sparrow male emitted a sharp call over and over as he perched on the top of a corn stalk. I couldn’t figure out what was disturbing him, although my neighbor was cutting his grass, so I though that might be it. These sparrows spend a lot of time on the ground, so I [...]
Rain-battered plants, finches, feeders, and other stuff.
Today’s air wafts the softness of the after-rain. The world is washed clean and every parched plant and tree has been replenished with streams of quenching water. While the tomatillo, tomato, and squash plants are a little worse for wear in their shaggy autumn wardrobes, the Swiss chard has taken on a new life. Even [...]