Category Archives: Snapshots

Snapshots, Wanderings, Wildflowers

Indian paintbrush

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Not the breathtaking scarlet, orange and yellow prairie flowers I was expecting, a rather more pallid view, but spring was slow in coming to North Dakota this year and the wildflowers were a few weeks behind schedule. A hint of color is just beginning to show on a few of the bracts in this pic and the leaves are shaped something like birds’ feet.

Indian Paintbrush is sort of interesting in that it’s partially parisitic – it derives some of its nutrients from other plants. Common hosts are little bluestem, blue-eyed grass and prairie smoke. There are at least 200 different species that are near impossible to separate from one another.

(End of geeky plant interlude)

Snapshots, Whatever

An epiphany!

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This will likely turn into a rant, so if you’re not in the mood for that, just click away and try back tomorrow.

😉

Today’s my brother’s birthday, btw. He lurks here and leaves snarky comments occasionally. Happy Birthday, Kev! In case you’ve forgotten, you’re still older than me. Ha!

(That used to seem like a good thing, didn’t it?)

I don’t know why it is, but most of the people I’ve really hit it off with through the years were born in June,like me,and are Geminis. I sometimes think it’s a wonder we can stand each other, but as they say: it takes one to know one.

One of my most favorite Geminis is Deb from work. We don’t work together in the same unit anymore, unfortunately, but have lunch once in a while and generally try to distract each other from boring paperwork for a few minutes each week. We used to go to lunch together every single day at the same place and eat the same thing, but that’s another story. We’d planned to have lunch last Friday for our birthdays, but she left me a message that morning to say that she had to cancel because she really had to get her nails and eyebrows done and that she was really sorry, but we’d have to reschedule. Priorities, you know. An hour or so later she left another message to say that she couldn’t get an appointment and if I wasn’t too pissed she’d like to go to lunch after all. Otherwise, she really needed to shop for a new bathing suit. Pfft! Great friend, huh?

(That all had nothing to do with the point of this post, sorry.)

So. We had lunch at her current every single day, eat the exact same thing place and it was lovely and we caught up with each other for the time being.

I walked out of the office kinda grumpy this afternoon and ran into Deb on her way out, too. She picked up on my mood pretty quickly and before we made it to the parking lot I was ranting at her about how I was tired of being yelled at by clients and landlords and pulled in a million directions at once. Tired, too, of screwing things up. Tired of having to ask someone how to do things. Tired of finding out, after, from someone different, that I’d been told to do it wrong. And made to feel foolish for it.

(Feeling foolish makes me grumpy, generally.)

Deb knows me. Knows my sore spots… and isn’t afraid to pester them, either. Know what she said?

“Don’t take yourself so seriously, Laura.”

Huh? Me?

She wandered off to her car and I thanked her for the reminder and then stood in the parking lot like a dope for a minute or two… sort of amazed that it was that obvious to her, that easy to read…

She’s absolutely right, though. I take myself way too seriously, usually. At work, especially. Foolish of me. I needed to hear that. Will probably need to hear it again, tomorrow.

Remind me, if she doesn’t, before I get too full of myself.

(I got flowers today, btw. Not sure what in the world I did to deserve that.)

Birds, Snapshots, Wanderings

Love in a pothole

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Western Grebes were the first *western* birds found on the adventure that was getting to North Dakota. A makeshift dinner beside a lake somewhere in Minnesota was accompanied by their whistling between dives for fish. They’re really striking birds – click on the pic for a better look at those red eyes!

Try as we might, we never picked out a Clark’s among the Western’s that populated the larger lakes and potholes. Nor was there much of their famous courtship display; they’re said to rise up and run across the water’s surface – might’ve been nice to see that! I like the suggestion of a heart in the space between their graceful long necks in this pic; maybe they were just beginning to think of love in that moment.

The breeding ducks were the biggest draw to the region, I think. There’d been more than a cold winter’s day or two spent searching the small local ponds and inlets in NJ for wintering ducks – to see Ruddies again; now with their ridiculously bright blue bills or a pair of Blue-winged Teal in every puddle and Canvasbacks and Shovelers and more Redheads than I’d really imagined possible – I’d felt lucky to find a single pair this winter – and now here they were, again, for our finding. The only real miss, in the breeding duck department, were Hoodies. I’m sure they were out there, we just didn’t find the right pothole.

😉

Birds, Small truths, Snapshots, Wanderings

Why North Dakota?

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I’ve always imagined the place we grow up to sink into our bones and set the course for where we feel most comfortable in life. For me, that’s meant the shore and the scent of a salt marsh at low tide… traffic and malls and lots of people. Something, though, has tugged at me to see a place where all the oceans are equally far away; a place where long stretches of land flow for miles unfettered by anything but my imagination.

Other places I’ve traveled to make the world feel small by comparison: the sky hemmed in by mountains or trees or buildings. The prairie is different. The landscape doesn’t shout out its beauty here, but entices you in small ways… the winnowing of snipe overhead, the soft huff of horses grazing in the predawn light, the starkness and loneliness of it, a velvet bowl of ink black sky so full of stars it makes you wonder what it might feel like to count so many, clouds that stumble across an unbelievably big sky, the long soft blur of sunset shadows that cross a patchwork of farm fields and prairie: where a few trees and a grain elevator are the only comfort for the eye in all that emptiness.

Maybe I like the challenge of finding beauty where others would see none… the black backbone of road and the faint lines of light at the horizon that mean there’s a town off the interstate, the nothing between me and a three wire barbed fence and a pasture of horses or bison, the wind that carries the grace notes of a meadowlark or a bobolink. This, this middle in the middle of nowhere, is a place of quiet where birdsong and the gentle whistle of wind are the only music and me the lonely audience.

There’s something here in the intersection of land and light, sky and the ever-present wind, the dark earth and the cerulean water in each and every pothole with its breeding ducks that communicates the language of this place; words of solitude translated by a yellow-headed blackbird hanging from cattails in a slough beside the road or the sight of ancient purple lilacs watching over deserted dooryards. There’s all of this and yet, sometimes, you need to bend close to the ground and pull the soft dusty green sage through your fingers or catch sight of prairie smoke blooming among the short grasses, with kingbirds squabbling on the fencerow behind you, to know that emptiness looks like this and that the place that one calls home need not be the only place a heart resides.

(Written mostly as a response to the cross-eyed glances of friends who wondered why I wouldn’t choose Hawaii as a vacation destination instead of the frozen land of North Dakota.)

😉

More to come…

Garden, In the neighborhood, Snapshots

White sweet May again*

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A gentle breeze has been slowly dropping the petals of our neighbor’s black locust into our pond. I love the snow-shower effect of it in late May and their fragrance is so wonderful on a humid day like today. No wonder the bees and hummers are drawn to it – there must be some sweet nectar inside the flowers!

I’d hoped for a close-up pic, but it’s too tall. This gives you an idea, though, of why I like these weedy trees so much… the afternoon sun glimmers among the branches, full of late May light, and the flowers dance in the air. They’re somehow related to wisteria – can you see that in the pendulous flowers? Plus they have similar pinnate leaves, but locusts have thorns, too. Especially thorny are the young ones that like to come up everywhere in our lawn. They’re one of the very few trees that I can reliably ID at all seasons; their bark is dark and deeply furrowed and they tend to grow in waste places, in old fields, along the roadside. Like other members of the pea family, black locusts fix nitrogen in the soil which makes it possible for them to grow in the poor soil found in those places.

I learned something new from Wikipedia about members of the pea family: their leaves fold together at night or in wet weather. I wonder why that might be… anybody know?

*from “The Locust Tree in Flower” by William Carlos Williams