All posts by laurahinnj

Wanderings, Whatever, Wildflowers

Exploring the Red Road

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If yesterday’s pic wasn’t a clue… I went on a pretty intense botany trip to the Pine Barrens on Sunday. MevetS was nice enough to invite me along, but probably didn’t properly prepare me. Sure, he said to bring lunch and bug spray and the directions led me to an unmarked sugar-sand road in the middle of the Pine Barrens, but…

Seeing this really scared me. Adding to the fashion faux-pas of tucking their pants into their socks, these folks were using packing tape around their ankles to further geek themselves out/protect against chiggers.

Chiggers? Huh?

Yesterday was brutally hot and the pines in the pygmy forest did little to provide any shade from the sun, but we wandered and wandered, with the promise of a ‘wetland’ somewhere along the way.

After a couple hours walking in the blazing sun, I was fantasizing about a cool blue pool of water and cabana boys, but…

These people were all about plants… and most of them weren’t even flowering plants!

😉

I’ve learned that plant people, as they progress and learn more, get really into sedges and rushes and grasses. This is kind of too much for me just now, kind of like shorebirds and gulls are too much for me as a birder.

I need colors and blooms and flashy stuff that catches my eye!

Digging up a sedge to be able to identify it based of the shape and fibrous nature of its roots?

Feels too much like aging gulls based on primary molt or whatever.

😉

TMI, especially when it’s 95 degrees and you’ve been walking for hours looking for the pool – which turned out to be nothing more than a mucky stream we had to bushwack our way through.

I’ll share a couple pics tomorrow of the few flowers we did manage to stumble across. I sound like I’m making fun, but mostly I’m almost awed by the knowledge and enthusiasm I witnessed with this group and wonder how long it’ll take me to be ready to tackle (and get excited about!) sedges (or gulls).

😉

In the new neighborhood, Remembering, Whatever

Clearwater

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The Clearwater Festival is an annual event; the state’s largest and oldest environmental music festival. I usually always find an excuse to go, even if it’s just for an hour or so to stroll among the vendors or listen to the music at the circle of song (pictured here).

I first remember going when I was in high school and back then the festival took place at Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook, right along the bay. A much nicer setting than where it is now, I think.

Anyway… there’s always an interesting mix of people to make for fun people-watching: hippie-types straight out of the sixties, kids with their faces painted like butterflies or flowers, today I even saw a young couple, multiple tattoos and body-piercings among them, strolling along with a rather large and vocal parrot on the woman’s wrist.

😉

Books

A coffee story

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I read the sweetest little book by Julia Alvarez yesterday evening… A Cafecito Story: A Story of Love, Coffee, Birds, and Hope.

😉

My coworker Linda, mi pana, is from the Dominican Republic and has been trying to sell me on Julia Alvarez for months. Mostly she writes something like historical fiction that spans the divide between her childhood in DR and her adult life here in the US. I enjoy the poetic way she often writes and this little book suited my short attention span of late.

It tells the story of one man’s love affair with a good cup of coffee and how the challenge of growing coffee under the shade of trees, where songbirds come to sing over the ripening coffee beans, ultimately inspires an organic shade-grown coffee company and a community. Cafe Alta Gracia is the name of that company and their coffee is available for sale through the Vermont Coffee Company.

Anyone tried it or have a favorite to recommend?

Snapshots, Wanderings, Wildflowers

Blue-eyed grass

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BLUE-EYED grass in the meadow
And yarrow-blooms on the hill,
Cattails that rustle and whisper,
And winds that are never still;


Blue-eyed grass in the meadow,
A linnet’s nest near by,
Blackbirds caroling clearly
Somewhere between earth and sky;


Blue-eyed grass in the meadow,
And the laden bee’s low hum,
Milkweeds all by the roadside,
To tell us summer is come.

Mary Austin

I love the contrast of the yellow throats with the purple petals! Another from the Chiwaukee Prairie in Wisconsin.

Birds, Whatever

Birds at the beach

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I wish there were something prettier to follow up that last post with, but…

I spent an hour or two at the beach after work yesterday and as much as I love it, I’m kinda scared to swim in the ocean and so mostly I just wade in a ways and try not to drown. The lifeguards here are so militant anyway, I guess because of the riptides, that they hardly let you go into the water deep enough to actually swim.

So I sat in the shallows with the gulls, letting the ocean fill my bikini bottom up with sand, just like a little kid. Fun! Gulls are pretty tolerant of people in the summertime, especially if they think you have food. They’re interesting to watch; the way they eye you over as you approach, how they watch each other and give chase if another finds an interesting morsel in the surf. They especially like pizza flavored Combos and will swallow them whole. Something really cool I saw yesterday was a bunch of those little fish the terns catch started jumping up out of the water… I guess to escape some predator down below (maybe a bluefish?)… and the gulls all got up at once and were grabbing those tormented fish right out of the air! I’ve even watched the burly gulls try to sneak up on a lone sanderling… explains why sanderlings are so flighty, I guess.

Terns are my favorites; probably I could watch them all day. I guess their young have recently fledged and the parents are still feeding them while they learn to fish for themselves. It seemed they were fishing in pairs and the adult would return to the sand with a fish in its bill, young one following behind, and land to feed the baby… sweet! Anyone else ever see that? I would think terns are acrobatic enough to be able to do a fish exchange in mid-air and wonder why they bother to land at all.

The laughing gulls are starting to look all disheveled… the summer’s drawing to a close, I guess.

Anything interesting happening with the birds in your neighborhood?

Whatever

Gratuitous

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Add this to the list of Things I Didn’t Need to See

(but had to blog anyway)
(fair warning: it’s about to get worse)

(grateful for having laid my towel sidewards of him)

😉
Can we girls offer some advice like, “No. Don’t ever. Please.”

In the new neighborhood, Small truths, Whatever

A doorway into thanks

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For terns and their fast wings
and the silvery fish that vanish beneath them.

For the little that I have
and less now, even, that you left me with.

For the oddly striped and sunblocked
and our ritual weekend-wash in the sea.

For my books
and your eye that didn’t discern their value.

For this memoried vessel
and its wealth of beauty in bloom.

It draws my eye from what’s been broken and dusted over;
a greasy black powder to name my fear.

For the comfort of neighbors
and the part of me, despite this, that wants to feel ok here.

For the perfect pink end to this day
and its voices that animate the darkest corners of my heart.

For your lack of any real malice
and the small brown bunny left in peace to be a witness.

For all the familiar things that mock me, unseen
and the Kingbird’s solemn regard.

For having no one, really, to run to
and surviving, anyway, this first of disasters.

*This post was created on a Mac!… the only happy result of my laptop and most all of my camera gear being stolen early this week. I’m working my way through being angry… and trying to find that thankful place in my heart again.