A Curious Miscellany

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Placid Surface

‘The best of a country’s history is written on its rivers.’ H.E. Bates After the brutal fire season here in the Pacific Northwest, we have been trying to spend more time than usual in our beloved Columbia River Gorge. Not all of the trails and viewpoints are open yet–many will takes years to recover from the fires–but there is a reassuring amount of untouched beauty still to be had. As is often…

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Magnificent Fluff

Gossamer is fragile. Fluff–it would appear–is everywhere, as tenacious as lint on black polyester. I only say this because I’m currently re-thinking my current obsession with photography. This is just a hobby for me, of course. An easy one. So easy, in fact, that I’m wondering (at least in my case) if it has begun to replace the ability to describe things in words. Everyday, awesome,…

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October Farewell

It seems I have forgotten, again, what this form of poetry is called, but it is simple, thus appealing: one syllable building up to ten and back to one. It works for me when the small framework of a haiku feels too restrictive. A personal note. This blog, since its beginning, has been about reading, writing, nature walks, and small moments of beauty. In all these little travels, via imagination…

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“I … wondered irrelevantly if I was to be caught with a teapot in my hand on every dramatic occasion.” Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

Leave it to the insightful wit of Barbara Pym to describe, in a quirky way, how it feels to live, at times, in this chaotic world. For the following poem, I put down the teapot, as it were, and went for a long walk in a favorite place.

Thinking of a friend today, beginning chemo, mastectomy, and a long, long road.

unquiet leaves fall from paper skies infinite confetti , shredded she seeks to match the restless day breathe’d mist her sole outcry

parchment paths through forest gloom softly walking, with no trace of where one has been some dry whisper rends the air, to lie amongst the lovely dead unquiet leaves

Paper Skies “I ... wondered irrelevantly if I was to be caught with a teapot in my hand on every dramatic occasion.” …

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Pardon the pun, but I actually am pressed for time! This week’s photo challenge for Collage has some beautiful and creative entries. (Click the link to see more.)

The word collage can be open to many interpretations–the word itself comes from the French word for glue (colle) and refers to the fact that typically, items of a like nature are pasted together, to create a memory album or some sort of artistic presentation.

I took the liberty with this shot of my ferns–taken during evening light–and used a filter to enhance the appearance of pressed, dried ferns in an album. All the antiquity of grandma’s dried leaf collection, but in considerably less time. And speaking of time… au revoir!

Pressed for Time Pardon the pun, but I actually am pressed for time! This week's photo challenge for Collage…

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‘Words have personality.’

Or words to that effect. So said a famous wordsmith named Willard R. Espy, who wrote a great deal of delightful stuff about words, and remains highly unquoted.

One word that definitely has personality is caper, which is today’s word suggestion from the good folks at WP.

I wouldn’t call myself a word expert, by any means, (terms like uvular fricative make my brain hurt) but I do love to savor a word curiosity now and then. And just like a good wine, there are certain pairings that are immediately suggested by the palate. Like a good pinot and soft goat cheese, or a full-flavored port with a dark chocolate truffle.

So therefore, with caper (though it is also a pungent little berry that goes well with seafood and a crisp, chilled chardonnay) we have a word that suggests, inevitably, frolic.

You could even pair the two as frolicsome caper, and further suggest the word antics, and at the risk of sounding octogenarian, cavort.  This brings me to my red squirrels, which, quite unfortunately, were drunk this morning on summer wine, and doing all of the above.

Summer wine not only goes well with capers, it causes them (the cavorting sort). The wine referred to here is what we like to call the Morello cherries from our tree that have fallen to the ground, now sweetly fermenting. They grow too high for us to actually make them useful for human consumption, but the squirrels and birds are having entirely too much fun up there in the back corner of the yard.

Gambol and tumble are good side dishes, as it were. If fact, if you look up ‘gambol’, you will find the following synonyms:

‘frolic, frisk, cavort, caper, skip, dance, romp, prance, leap, hop, jump, spring, bound, bounce; play; (dated, sport)’

To which I might add “see: tippling“.

All of those definitions sound quite athletic, even for a squirrel drunk on Morello cherries, so occasionally one tumbles down the rockery and causes concern.

So far I have witnessed no injuries, and the merriment continues.

As you can see from the picture below, the lawn is slightly elevated from the patio, giving a stage-like appearance, which the squirrels use to good effect.

Other than that, the garden is (usually) a peaceful place for reading. Perhaps even sipping a bit of Morello summer wine, if the squirrels will share.

  Summer Wine and Word Savor 'Words have personality.' Or words to that effect. So said a famous wordsmith named Willard R. Espy, who wrote a great deal of delightful stuff about words, and remains highly unquoted.

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Lucy Carmichael, Part Two

Lucy Carmichael, Part Two

‘She is incautious and intrepid. She will go to several wrong places, and arrive at the right one, while I am still making up my mind to cross the road. She is my opposite in character. She is cheerful and confident and expects to be happy.’ Lucy Carmichael, by Margaret Kennedy If this description makes you think of Elizabeth Bennet, then you will enjoy noting several such Pride and Prejudice…

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Lucy Carmichael: A Preamble

Lucy Carmichael: A Preamble

The book of the moment is another gem by Margaret Kennedy — Lucy Carmichael, published in 1951.  I am always happy for a chance to explore a Margaret Kennedy book, and Jane at Beyond Eden Rock is hosting a reading event for Margaret Kennedy today. This is a warm-up to my own review of the book, and likely the best way, as I am sure this review would need to be a Part One and Two, anyway! There…

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‘A rural portico was seen, Aloft on native pillars borne, Of mountain fir with bark unshorn Where Ellen’s hand had taught to twine The ivy and Idaean vine, The clematis, the favored flower Which boasts the name of virgin-bower, And every hardy plant could bear Loch Katrine’s keen and searching air. An instant in this porch she stayed, And gayly to the stranger said: ‘On heaven and on thy lady call, And enter the enchanted hall!”

— excerpted from The Lady of the Lake, Sir Walter Scott

Of bloom and blossom, blur and bliss… finding a bit of all of the above in my clematis bower on this beautiful Saturday. Of the blur effect, for the photography suggestion of ‘focus‘ this week, I was trying out my new portrait feature on the iPhone, as there are power lines just beyond that cross the background, disrupting my lovely Lady of the Lake ambience. The blur effect, in turn, created the illusion that a clematis bloom had catapulted itself away from the pack and was on its way to some wild adventure.

(go little clematis, go!)

Clematis Bower 'A rural portico was seen, Aloft on native pillars borne, Of mountain fir with bark unshorn…

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Upon Reflection

morning light paragon of plentitude in golden shades your bronze casting does elicit honest reflection; truth must truthful be; still in your capricious way of light with lines you haunt me with curious angularities that suggest (perhaps) the time is not right for selfies genusrosa

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‘I found quite quickly that nothing bored people so immediately and completely as botany.’ — Nan Fairbrother, An English Year

    At the risk of being boring… botany and macro-photography of the plant world is something I enjoy. I am just a keen amateur, of course, but when the photography suggestion for the week was ‘Order‘… I immediately thought of seed pods. These are some recent pictures I took of my faded peony. The flowers were stunning–and I did get many pictures of those–but, to me, the seed pods are even more fascinating. (They suggest to me fuzzy slippers, strewn with the limp confetti of spent petals and popped balloon detritus, and a warm and cozy morning after a really good party the night before, which can now be endlessly discussed at leisure and over several cups of coffee while we ponder Who Came and What Was Said.)

But what, I wondered, was inside? So I sliced one in half to peek into the busy command central of future flower production.

Within these tiny packets is an irony. There are few things more DIS-orderly than an untended garden. Yet seed production in the world of plants is an example of order in the most breathtaking sense of the word.

Where the seeds go, and how they are tended is where the hand of man comes in.

‘Each family of flowers—rose, daisy, buttercup—is like a theme of music, and the different species are variations on it.’ — Nan Fairbrother

Nan Fairbrother

I am currently re-reading excerpts from Nan Fairbrother’s An English Year.  (see sidebar link for more) I return to this book often, actually, as it’s the sort of book not easily absorbed in just one sitting.

When it comes to plants, we connect quite sympathetically:

‘It was on these days that I came to know and love the country. I travelled for miles around, for an active child can go a long way on a bicycle in eight hours. I became so familiar with the trees and flowers that they were nearer and far dearer than any people. I saved up and bought Johns’s Flowers of the Field… I learnt to run down in a flora the flowers I did not know. I struggled with botany books on osmotic pressure and the history of flowering plants and the difference in structure between monocotyledons and dicotyledons.’

And perhaps, if she were alive today, she might also be slicing seed pods, arranging them in the best light, (perhaps while balancing them on her knees) and holding a little phone camera as steadily as possible to best capture an interior world and glimpses of a colorful future.

  Cultivation ‘I found quite quickly that nothing bored people so immediately and completely as botany.’ — Nan Fairbrother, …

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Legal Tender

When tender is legal It becomes less interesting As the history of the novel Might suggest Next up, Barsetshire–Angela Thirkell’s version–where marriages abound, and romance is given the funniest treatment ever. ‘Mr. Downing, slightly intoxicated by talking about himself and the delightful evening he was having, had a curiously empty feeling in the arm nearest to Mrs. Turner and was vaguely…

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Crisp (haiku)

Curious, this light Renders crisp the silhouette Of transient bloom Enjoying my first Graham Stuart Thomas blooms (oh, fleeting June, stay a little longer!)

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The Rose Garden Husband

The Rose Garden Husband

‘Well, she had everything that she had wished for on that wet February day in the library. Money, leisure to be pretty, a husband whom she “didn’t have to associate with much,” rest, if she ever gave herself leave to take it, and the rose garden. She had her wishes, as uncannily fulfilled as if she had been ordering her fate from a department store, and had money to pay for it.’ That may sound…

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Greetings, Mr. Lear

‘Imaginary‘ When your imagination Is controlling you An imaginary world, when created by a truly gifted, conflicted mind, has the vexatious tendency to outlive its author. An author/artist who, perhaps, had dreams of accomplishing something more weighty is remembered by Quangle-Wangles, Pobbles, and Jumblies. As a curious word devotee, I have to give a nod to imaginary worlds as they have given…

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Where Character Comes From

Where Character Comes From

“Brassy.” It’s Friday, so I like to start Happy Hour early. Here’s a bit of Ogden Nash-esque whimsy for you: Your brassy hues, my dear Give us cause to wonder Are you as bold as your hair suggests Or did your stylist blunder? A poem born from painful memory of my first salon experience…but as the accompanying picture suggests, brassy, coppery hues and a certain scorched, peeling appearance from…

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No Made Up Tale

No Made Up Tale

As usual, when I sit down to write upon a topic, that topic immediately becomes much vaster than the ‘brief paragraph or two with accompanying picture’ will give justice to. I am a long-winded writer because…well…things are just interesting. Right? Or not. You see, ‘portion control’ is what I have been striving to achieve with my blog. Most people relate portion control to food, if they tend to…

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