Harlequin Cabbage Bugs Doin’ What Comes Naturally
Such beautiful but destructive bugs…this summer they will no doubt be chowing down on our squash. But aren’t they lovely? My National Audubon Society Field Guide says they are “proportioned like a heraldic shield.”
Ant on Petal on Rock: I was taking a shot of the tulip petal that fell on the rock after the rain, when an ant wandered into my picture, pausing to drink from a raindrop.
Morning Bouquet-On My Porch (For Mama)
Though she’s been gone for over 22 years, not a day passes that I don’t think of Mama. Most times it’s the simplest things that trigger my memories—hearing a mockingbird sing or seeing the dogwood tree illuminated by the morning light. Or a vase full of the wildflowers I just picked—Mama preferred them over the store bought kind. Although they never knew her, my children are so like her—dreamy and artistic, yet down to earth and plainspoken. She would adore them.
I’ve wondered a lot about where our souls go when we die. People talk about their loved ones who have passed being in heaven, but really the Bible doesn’t say that we go straight to heaven when we die. Years ago, on Ariel’s birthday, we were in Duke Gardens when we saw a wood thrush on the path ahead. It didn’t fly away as we approached, but cocked its head and sang, looking straight at us. Then it started hopping down the path, looking back at us as though to say Follow me. So we did. The wood thrush led us for quite a ways, hopping and looking back, before finally flying up away into the sweet spring morning. It was a magical moment, made more so by the fact that it was Ariel’s birthday. I must admit, my first thought was that the soul of my mother was temporarily housed in that wood thrush’s body. After all, wood thrushes were one of her favorite birds.
Who can say? Is it so far-fetched to believe that our souls may reside in many different places before the day comes when our spirits rise to be reunited with our Maker? And I know, for sure, my Mama would want to spend most of that time flying. She couldn’t walk for the last five years of her life, so I love to imagine her soaring up far above our earthbound selves or perched singing in her beloved dogwood tree.
So I talk to all the birds I see, just in case, and chase the black cat that skulks about our property stalking birds. I watch as the birds fly into the firmament, gazing at them until they disappear. I listen to the wood thrush at dusk, singing its sweet but slightly melancholy song from the highest forest trees. And I smile, thinking of Mama and relish the thought that she’s singing for us, that’s she’s flying through the clouds. Waiting for the day that we fly, too.
Happy Mother’s Day to Mama. And to all Mamas, near and far.
And to all Mamas in this world…or the next.
Maple Seeds
(I called them “whirly birds” when I was small. Who can resist throwing handfuls of them into the air to watch them twirl their way to the ground?) Country Dew has a great post on them here. She called them “dibbas.”
Eastern Tiger Swallowtail on Lilacs
(To Tom: I’m so glad I married you twenty-one years ago. Though the journey has been hard and we are weary, I’m grateful to have taken the journey with you. And I hold fast to the belief [and I hope you will too] that the best is yet to be. Happy Anniversary.)
[Are these the "evil scissors" you were looking for? (For more of this, go here.)]
In my last post, I alluded to the search engine terms shown in my statistics that bring people to my blog. They are great fun to read and are the main reason I look at my stats. Lord knows, I sure don’t get any pleasure out of that line graph they show where I often see, in one painful glance, the precipitous plunge of my plummeting blog statistics.
But the search engine terms are quite entertaining—sometimes humorous, sometimes happy, sometimes poetic, and sometimes poignant. And sometimes, they’re real headscratchers. For example, this one: “rat collars; I put them on my rat.” Now this one gives rise to so many questions. First, which one of my posts did that phrase correspond to? Do they really put a collar on their rat? Why? If so, do they take their rats for a walk? Are there little rat leashes too? If they do take them for a walk, what happens when they meet a cat? Where do you buy rat collars? Do rats really have a well-defined neck that a collar would work with? Really, the questions are endless.
In the same “headscratcher” category, we have “evil scissors,” “snake recipes,” “family tree nuts,” and “babies playing poker.” “Babies playing poker” certainly brings an immediate image to your mind, doesn’t it? Can’t you just see the babies, with Budweisers in their hands, cigars dangling from their mouths, poker chips piled high, sitting in diapers around a table?
Then there’s the funny and whimsical—“leaf quizzical,” “money spiders,” “bee collision,” and “quiet stupidity.” One thing’s for sure—I’ll take “quiet stupidity” over “loud stupidity” any day.
But my favorites are the poetic ones. “Nobler modes of life.” “He treasures her like a poem.” “The forever kind of love.” What I like imagining are all the wonderful stories behind these searches. Who are you, sweet man, who treasures your lover like a poem and loves her, no doubt, with the forever kind of love? A nobler mode of life you live, to be sure.
But there are two that I get on a regular basis that almost bring me to tears. One of them is “Mama died I miss her” or “Where are you Mama” or just “mama.” The other is a single word: “Alone.” Or sometimes “Lonely.”
For any of you that find my blog using that phrase, I hope you have found just a little bit of what you’re looking for. If you are lonely, I hope that, somehow, reading my blog helps by showing you that you are not alone in feeling lonely. It’s a universal emotion that very few of us escape. And I hope that reading the kind comments of my blogging friends makes you feel just a little less alone, as it does me, by helping you see, as I have, that there is goodness and kindness yet to be found in this sad, tired, old world. And that I, and you, are not alone. We are not alone.
Yep, that’s right…I took this photo because my shoeprint looked like the imprint of a giant peanut. Or at least, I thought so. And things like that really tickle me. A lot. Kind of silly, I reckon. Perhaps you’re thinking how dull my life must be to be thrilled by a peanut-shaped footprint. Or maybe you think I’m just a nut. Or a goober. That’s O.K., I don’t mind.
I like that even at the age of fifty, I’m easily awed and have a great capacity for wonder because it means I have something wondrous in my life every single day, even if it’s just a footprint that looks like a peanut.
Besides, I really like imagining that very soon, I will look at my blog stats and see that someone has Googled “footprint shaped like a peanut,” and it brought them right to my site. And they are thrilled to find exactly what they were looking for—the footprint of a goober in the mud.
