The Footprint of a Nut

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. 

Thanksgiving

‘Tis the season to be grateful…oh, wait, no…‘tis the season to be jolly.  But I’m still in a Thanksgiving frame of mind.   I feel kind of bad about my post listing what I don’t have…a laptop, a cello, and Niagara Falls.  But the truth is, I don’t usually spend much time thinking about what I don’t have.  Always, my greatest pleasure is in the simple joys that I do possess.

On Thanksgiving Day, appropriately, I had one of those moments of sheer gratitude and joy.  You know, one of those pure moments where you’re not thinking of the bad things that happened yesterday or the worse things that might happen tomorrow…you’re just present in the moment and mindful of the blessing of it. 

I was preparing our Thanksgiving feast.  We actually hadn’t planned to be here on Thanksgiving Day.  We had planned to take a ten mile hike, our backpacks filled with turkey sandwiches and apple bread.   But it was pouring rain (which, these days, is itself something to be thankful for).  So there I was in the kitchen, puttering happily around, checking on the mashed potatoes, the green beans, the smoked turkey…you know, the usual.  The smell in the house was heavenly—oak logs burning in the wood stove, a hint of garlic in the potatoes, and buttery croissants baking in the oven.  Tom (my husband) was reading in his recliner; Ariel and Benjamin (my children) were talking and laughing together on the couch, with Benjamin noodling around on his guitar.  I was standing at the kitchen window, looking out at the mountains in the fog and thinking how fortunate we were to live in this lovely place, to be in this house—a warm refuge from the cold rain outside.

Benjamin began to sing, strumming the guitar, and Ariel joined in, harmonizing:

You—who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good-bye…

For those of you that don’t recognize the song, it’s Teach Your Children by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.  I came around the corner and stood listening.  Tom put down his book and began to sing along:

And you of tender years
Can’t know the fears
That your elders grew by.
And so please help
Them with your youth
They seek the truth
Before they can die.

I stood there gazing at my family, beaming, my whole being suffused with happiness.  They sang on, stumbling over some of the words they didn’t know and sometimes getting a little off-key.   But they sang the chorus loud, strong, and sure, especially the last two lines:

…So just look at them and sigh
    And know they love you.

They finished with a flourish, laughing.  I looked at them and sighed with contentment and knew I loved them…beyond imagining. 

And then…the kitchen timer rang.  I went back to the kitchen, taking the bread out of the oven and adding a little more garlic to the green beans.  As I stirred the beans, the tears came, flowing down my face and dropping into the beans.  I let them flow and just stirred them in.  I put all the food on the table and called everyone to eat.

We said a simple prayer of thanks, passed the dishes around, and dug in.  “Mmm,” said Tom.  “These green beans are extra good.”

I smiled and said, “Not too salty?”

“No,” he said.  “Just right.”

Yes, I thought, as I took a bite of the beans and smiled at my family. Yes indeed. 

Just right.

Of or Pertaining to…Love

My daddy was a Baptist preacher.  He favored small country churches in Eastern North Carolina, down where I grew up, whose members were of modest means.  Which meant, of course, that we didn’t have a lot of money to spare, but—dang!—we ate good!  Rachael Ray and Emeril don’t have nothin’ on the dear ladies of the little country churches Down East.  Moist, succulent fried chicken; melt-in-your-mouth pecan pie; buttery flaky biscuits.  Why, it seemed almost…sinful.

But I digress.  Since we didn’t have a lot of material things, we were really good at finding cheap ways to have fun.  One of my favorites was playing Fictionary.  Here are the basic rules from Wikipedia:

Fictionary, also known as the Dictionary Game or Balderdash, is a word game in which players guess the definition of an obscure word.
A turn consists of one player picking a word from the dictionary and each other player composing a fake definition. A round is completed when each player has selected a word to be guessed.
Players earn points (1) by guessing the correct definition of a word, (2) by composing a fake definition that other players guess is the correct one, and (3) as Picker, selecting a genuine word that no players vote for.
The winner is the player who has earned the most points after a pre-determined number of rounds.

The best thing is that all you need to play is a group of people, a dictionary, paper, and a pencil for everyone. Now, what made me think of this was Ariel, at Lucky Pennies, using the word “assonance.”  I didn’t know what it meant, so I looked it up in my beloved American Heritage College Dictionary.  As I was looking it up, I suddenly thought of Fictionary, which led me to remember my Daddy and his…well…rather transparent playing style.

By that I mean that every single fake definition Daddy wrote to try to fool the rest of us had the phrase “of or pertaining to” in front of it.  Daddy had the notion that this particular phrase had a sort of etymological oomph that would be certain to dupe us all.  So, for the word “assonance,” Daddy quite likely would have written something like the following fake definition:  “Of or pertaining to asses; as it relates to the breeding of donkeys.”
 
To my knowledge, Daddy never won a game.   But he never seemed to grasp the fact that we were all privy to his “secret” strategy.   No, he blamed Mama.  Every time she was the Picker (the one who picked the word and read all the “definitions”), she would get tickled when she read Daddy’s definition.  She would try to suppress it, but usually, she’d start to giggle.  Daddy then would look annoyed and say, in a peeved voice, “Winnie, I wish you wouldn’t do that.”  Then, of course, everybody would start to laugh.  And Daddy couldn’t stay in his snit for long—pretty soon he was laughing, too.

Why is it that the smallest things you remember seem the clearest and sweetest?  The naïve innocence of my Daddy’s “secret” strategy, the way my Mama’s lips twitched when she tried to suppress her laugh, and the way the room lit up when we were all laughing together for pure joy. 

Well, I guess it’s no secret.  These memories that I hold fast to, that tug so urgently at my heart have one thing in common, and I think I can define it for you.  They are all…of or pertaining to…love.

Finding Firewood in the Fiery Woods of Fall

 

Fred First of Fragments from Floyd recently challenged his readers to write a description of the smells that evoke autumn for them.  Fred himself penned a lovely piece and commenters also wrote vivid and poetic expressions of fall.  Colleen of Loose Leaf Notes later posted a wonderful fall poem that she wrote, inspired by Fred’s challenge.

At first I stalled, daunted by the task, but then decided to follow through on my recent pledge to not compare myself to everyone else but to go ahead and stick my creative neck out, even when I’m scared.  In the blog world, the writers I admire most are the ones who post their poetry, because I think there is no writing more personal.  In fact, for me, the only thing more intimidating than posting a poem would be to post a picture of myself!

But anyway, in the spirit of being bolder, here’s the poem I wrote (slightly edited).  I later realized that I’d gone off on a poetic tangent since my poem didn’t specifically address the sense of smell.  I apologize, Fred.  This is just what came out when I thought about how our woods smell in autumn.  It’s about my favorite fall chore—gathering firewood for the winter.

Sharp

The chainsaw sings a high keening dirge
For the deadwood it cuts sharp and clean.
Sharp and clean, the crisp autumn air
Burns my lungs as I carry,
Through the glory of
Blazing bright leaf fall,
The tree’s final gift to us
That will come alive again
In our woodstove as it
Burns bright in a blaze of glory
Saving us from the cutting of
The sharp winter wind.

The Faces That Launched a Thousand Quips

 

The Nut Family Climbs a Mountain to See the Pretty Leaves.

Feeling a little blue?  I’ve got just the thing.  Cheapest therapy your $6.95 can buy.  It’s  Googly Eyes by the editors of Klutz.  Not only is the book a hoot, with hilarious pictures and clever captions, but it comes with oodles of googly eyes.  (Wow, that phrase is really fun to say!)  Yes, you too can instantly bring common, ordinary household objects alive!  Be the life of the party!  Thrill to the silliness!

It is particularly fun to surreptitiously apply these little googly eyes to items in the homes of friends and family for them to find later after you are gone.  I like to imagine someone finding them after a long, hard day at work and laughing out loud with delight.   (One important caveat:  You shouldn’t have these in a home with children present under the age of three.  The googly eyes are definitely a choking hazard.)

Below are the pictures I took of my own googly-eyed critters.  Yes, those are my groaningly silly captions, with the name of the transformed ordinary object below it.  (I make no apologies for my puns! Read at your own risk!)  The pictures (and captions) in the book are even funnier than mine, but it was more fun to come up with my own, even if they’re not as humorous.  At least they made us laugh.  A lot.  But then, we are easily amused.

Leaf me alone!

(Leaf.  Duh.)

Its bark is worse than its bite.

(Knot in tree)

A flowering friendship.

(A coneflower.  Duh again.)

“I’ve just gone to seed.”

(Dead coneflower.)

An enlightened fellow.

(Lamp.)

Just handle it!

(car door handle)

I am knot!

(Knot. In tree.)

I’m a little gaseous!

(Propane tank cover.)

Oooh, my eyes are watering!

(Watering can.)

Hair today; gone tomorrow!

(Downy seeds of bull thistle.)

You turn me on!

(That’s right.  A lamp)

A well-matched pair!

(Salt and Pepper shakers)

Orange-Crested Sharp-Beaked Cutterbird

(Umm…scissors)

Socket to me!

(O.K.  I’ll let you guess on this one.  Hee, hee)

 

An Unrestrained Exuberance

 

We really like the National Audubon Society Field Guide series.  These little books are compact, portable, and it’s easy to find what you’re looking for.  Of course, their compact nature means that they are not particularly comprehensive, but we’ve been able to find in there most of the plants, animals, and minerals we’ve encountered in the natural world.

Above you can see the well-loved and well-used volumes we own.  The wonderful thing about the Audubon books is that, despite their small size, they are so much more than a dry listing of families, genera, species, and unpronounceable Latin names.  Their vivid, colorful descriptions really bring whatever you’re reading about alive.  (That is, unless you’re reading about rocks.  Then I guess you’d say the description really…um…solidifies your knowledge.  Or maybe you’d say “this book rocks!”  Or it is a…gem).
 
Anyway, the other day, I wanted to figure out the difference between a Monarch butterfly and a Viceroy.  They look an awful lot alike, at least to my untrained eye.  So I looked up Viceroys and found this very, very cool fact about their caterpillars.  I’ll quote it straight from the book, because I loved the wry humor inherent in this scientific fact:  “The irregular shape and color of the caterpillar produce a striking resemblance to bird droppings,  giving the insect considerable protection from predators.”

Ha, ha, ha, ha…I love that!  I also found, when I looked up Monarchs, that “The Canadians call this butterfly “King Billy” because its orange and black colors are those of King William of Orange.”  And, of course, that’s how the Monarch got its name.

So here’s where I deviate from talking about Nature to talk about a different kind of nature—human nature.  My nature, to be specific. I just really need to know.  When you out there in Blogland hear some fascinating, wondrous fact like the above, do any of you get excited?  I mean, like, really, really excited?  Like I-Just-Won-A-Hundred-Bucks-in-the-Lottery excited? 

I do.   When I read or hear something like this, my pulse quickens, my face flushes, and I can’t wait to tell someone else.  In fact, I cringe to say this, but when I read the fact about Viceroy caterpillars resembling bird droppings, I laughed out loud and…clapped my hands in delight.  Yes, you read that right.  I clapped my hands in glee over hearing that a caterpillar resembles bird poop.
 
I am particularly prone to this when it comes to word derivations.  For example, I just found out that the word “nice” comes from a Middle English word meaning “foolish,” which comes from a Latin word meaning “to be ignorant.”  Wow.  Incredible.  Now I know why so many people say I’m “nice.”

So, what I want to know is this:  Do any of you out there get excited like this?  Okay, maybe not “clap-your-hands” excited.  I know that’s probably over the edge.  *Cringe*  But maybe you just feel really happy about some quirky little fact?   And please don’t think this is a shameless attempt to bump up my comment count.  I really am curious.  Am I really that strange or am I just really easy to please?  Or maybe both?

And no, you don’t have to comment.   But it sure would be…nice.

The Transformative Power of Light

I was sweeping my porch a couple of days ago when I was struck (as I so often am) by the way a particular slant of late afternoon light set our woods aglow.  I laid down the broom, sat on the steps in the golden sunbeam and thought (as I so often do) about how light can transform the most ordinary things into breathtaking loveliness.

Of course, I know that’s not exactly an original thought.  Neither is the idea of that pure ray of light being a metaphor for how the Light of God can transform us.  But sometimes, the simplest things are the most profound.

But, anyway, I came up with the idea of seeing how much of this light beauty I could capture in just fifteen minutes, in my own ordinary yard, taking shots of ordinary subjects, on an ordinary day, with my ordinary camera.  To show that you needn’t go further than your own yard to find grace and beauty and how that (and those!) we deem most common are often worthy of a second look.
 
Behold—the transformative power of light:

Illuminated Dogwood Leaves

Bull Thistle Down Aglow

Light Escapes Under Our Deck

Down Our Light Dappled Forest Path

More Illuminated Dogwood Leaves

Fritillary on Luminous White Snakeroot

Leaf Alight

Shining Monarch on White Snakeroot

Telling On Myself/Learning To Practice What I Preach/Irony Hits Me Upside My Head

The one thing that is guaranteed to send me off into the deep end is a computer glitch.  The most frustrating aspect of this is the fact that I rarely have any idea at all how I got into the trouble.  In addition, even if the problem inexplicably resolves itself, I rarely have any idea at all how I got out of trouble.  So I live with the terrible knowledge that somewhere down the road, it’s probably going to happen again. 

So it was on Monday, when I tried to post my piece about sundogs and The Cloud Appreciation Society.   I’ve been blogging for a couple of weeks now, so I was feeling confident, almost smug. (Here’s where I should tell you that my very first photo post took me three hours to finish.  Three hours.)  But I was getting a handle on this blogging thing.  Yeah. This was going to be a piece of cake.

When I tried to load the photograph of the sundog, it was huge, covering my whole blog page, so that my sidebar completely disappeared.  I was flummoxed, as the photo was about the same pixel size as all the other photos I had uploaded.  So I went back, reduced its size further, and reloaded it.  Still enormous.  Still no sidebar.  So, over and over and over again, I reduced the size of the sundog picture until it was only 48KB.   Still gigantic.  In the course of doing this, I accidentally deleted the written part of my post, including my links to The Cloud Appreciation Society and my pictures of clouds.

By now, I had been working on this for two hours.  I was actually trembling with frustration, sweating profusely, and almost hyperventilating.  It was about this time that Tom, my husband, came in.  He was excited. 

“Beth, you’ve got to come out and see this cloud.  It’s settled right on top of the mountain like snow, and the little wisps of it are trailing down the sides, but the sky is pure blue above!  It’s amazing!”

I wiped my perspiring hands on my jeans. “Umm, not right now, honey.  I’m trying to make this post upload.  You know… the one about The Cloud Appreciation Society.”

Tom stared at me.  “Just come out for a second.  This cloud is really something.”

“Not right now!  I’ve got to finish this cloud post!”  I felt irritated.  Why doesn’t he leave me alone?  Damn this stupid post.  Stupid blog.  Stupid sundog.  Stupid cloud. 

Tom was still staring at me.  In a significant way.  But, of course, I was too distracted to care about why.  Dadgummit,  I was going to finish this post about the beauty of sundogs and clouds if it killed me.  

Tom didn’t say another word.  He grabbed his camera and went back out.

I retyped the piece and redid the links to The Cloud Appreciation Society.  And that’s when it happened.  Yep, it was like in the movies.  In the old movies, that is.  You know, where the lead character has a sudden epiphany.  Their eyes widen in amazement, their mouth falls open, and they hear, as though in a dream, the words that opened their eyes, that single revelatory phrase, over and over, echoing through their astonished mind.  The Cloud Appreciation Society…Cloud appreciation…cloud appreciation…cloud appreciation…

Yep.  Irony hit me upside my head with a sledgehammer.  And, just like in the movies, I shook my head and smiled a rueful smile, as I faced the folly of my ways.  Slipping on my shoes and grabbing my camera, I headed outside.  Outside to look up.  To look up at the wonder of the clouds.  To “marvel at their ephemeral beauty.”

Footnote:  Indeed, beauty is ephemeral.  So I was too late to capture the cloud enshrouding the mountaintop at its best.  But here’s what I did see once I came to my senses and went outside.

 

Looking Up

 

The faint iridescence you see in this cloud is called a sundog, which occurs when ice crystals shaped like hexagonal prisms refract sunlight.  These ice crystals are contained in cirrus or cirrostratus clouds. Sundogs happen mostly when the sun is low (at sunrise or sunset).  I took this photograph from my front yard a couple of hours before sunset.  As sundogs go, this one is pretty run-of-the-mill, but there’s something to be said for the happy serendipity of looking up to see something like this while you’re engaged in an ordinary task like watering the flowers.

And speaking of serendipity, while Googling “sundog,” I was clicking around when I found a website that made me laugh out loud with delight. (Sometimes, for me, looking up something on the Internet is like looking up a word in the dictionary. You know how it is: you go to find out if “folio” has the same derivation as “foliage,” and before you know it, you’re lost in the “F’s.”   Fogbow…Foehn….Foison…) 

Anyway, my vote for one of the Best Sites I Found While Looking For Something Else goes to the The Cloud Appreciation Society, who fight valiantly “the banality of ‘blue-sky thinking.’”  I’m generally not much of a joiner of clubs (mostly because I’m such an oddball, it’s hard to find a place where I fit in).  But I’d like to wear the badge of The Cloud Appreciation Society, if they’ll have me.  Check out their Manifesto and the Cloud Gallery.  I hope to capture a cloud soon that might be worthy of their Gallery.

Thank you, Cloud Appreciation Society.  I hereby pledge to “fight ‘blue-sky thinking.’”  And to look up at the clouds every day and “marvel at their ephemeral beauty.”

Looking up from my front yard.

Looking up from my back yard.

The Simple Life

I’m new to this blogging stuff, so I’m still fumbling in the dark when it comes to figuring out all the dandy doodads available through my excellent blogging host WordPress.  But I did manage to pick up on how to add tags to my posts.  (I am amazed at the resourcefulness people show in working as many as fifteen tags into their posts!)

When I wrote this post, ”Being There,”  I decided to make one of my tags The Simple Life.  After I posted, I clicked on the tag The Simple Life listed with my post to read what others had written on the subject.  I expected musings on nature, perhaps spiritual observations, or maybe, like me, simple people writing about their simple lives.  Imagine my bewilderment when I started scrolling down the page:  Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Paris, Nicole, pregnant, DUI, eating disorder….

Say what?

It turns out there is a reality show called The Simple Life that stars Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.  Now I have a feeling that this is pretty common knowledge.  But in case you’re saying, “Good grief, blueridgebluecollarwoman, have you been living in a cave?!!”  Well, no, but I do live in a mountain valley, which gives us terrible television reception.  There was a little satellite dish here when we came, but we never had it connected.  So we’re a little out of the loop when it comes to modern pop culture.  Before our teenagers went to college, they kept us just enough in the loop to be able to not look like total idiots at social gatherings.  But now that they’re gone, we’re slipping, I think, into some sort of time warp that renders us socially inept when conversations turn to TV and celebrities.

So I Googled The Simple Life.  It seems that the idea of the show is to put Paris and Nicole into situations far out of their comfort zone, which, it seems, would be almost any situation in the real world, since their world as rich, socialite party girls must be a bit small and limited.  It’s interesting to note that the description of the show on the Internet Movie Database included this line:

Plot Keywords:

Superficial / Superficiality / Stupidity 
 
I’m thinking that these keywords might be significant.  Now since I’ve never seen the show, I can’t comment on its quality.  But it seems unlikely that someone like me whose favorite TV show of all time is The Andy Griffith Show would be a fan.  I’m pretty sure I’d take Thelma Lou over Paris any day.  There is some portent, I suppose, in the fact that I tried to tag a post about nature and spirituality with The Simple Life, only to find the phrase hijacked by two bleached blonde playgirls.  But I don’t want to think about it right now.

I quickly changed my tag to Living Simply, and soon after, my post disappeared from the Simple Life page.  But I do enjoy imagining someone clicking on my post, hoping to see the latest pictures of Paris and Nicole, but being greeted instead with the terrible beauty of a flower spider, as she devours the unfortunate honeybee who wandered, unsuspecting, into her wretched grasp.