26.
The Wild Geese Story
I walked past this planter this morning and the whole geese story popped into my head.
I bought this to remember them by about ten years ago.



We were living in a remote part of Oregon...big ranch country. We had a few acres carved out of all their acres.
Our nearest neighbors were Denny and Laura....Denny worked for one of the ranches.
One day while cutting a field he had to destroy a Canadian goose nest.
Only four eggs remained intact, and Denny brought them home to Laura.
After that I was over there every day so curious and delighted to be able to watch wild geese grow.

Hatching




Swimming in an old tub out in the shed.
They are two weeks old in this picture.


At four weeks they follow Laura because she was imprinted on them


Four weeks...pestering Midge who tolerated them


Four weeks...outside pool



A handful at four weeks


Six weeks...gangly...fluffy, but with emerging wing and tail feathers.
They were named now...and could be told apart by little differences.
Spring, April, May and Sunny


Eight weeks and stretching those wing


Eight weeks...all four can't fit in one pool anymore.


At maturity they were beautiful birds





Preening



Laura and I were dreading the day our children would fly away. All four were loving individuals with different personalities.

We could tell they were getting ready...they used to race across the yard,
flapping their wings...

and one day they just lifted out of the yard into the air.

It was as thrilling as when one of your children takes their first step.

From then on they flew every day, but kept in circles over their yard.

One day a hired hand drove in to the yard. In the back of his pickup was a cowdog who jumped out and somehow got in to the back yard. He lit into the startled geese and began snapping at them. Three rose into the air but poor Spring was trapped against the fence.

By this time Laura ran screaming into the back yard chasing the dog away but Spring had a broken wing.

Thoroughly traumatized, she refused to move, eat or drink for a long time....

The other three left for a year.

The season went by and then Laura and I began searching the skies for our three to return. So many things could have happened to them. They were so tame maybe they landed somewhere and someone shot them.

But...they came back! We were so thrilled. But it was just a brief visit. We'd see them circling the small valley but finally they left.

Then Laura and Denny bought a small ranch of their own, and we moved too. Laura wrote and said she never saw her babies again.

Spring lived out her days with the barnyard geese.



I painted this little oil painting for Laura before we moved.

Spring, April, May and Sunny

25.
Hidden in this camouflage is a teeny frog that could easily sit on my little fingernail were I clever enough to charm him.

The only reason he caught my eye was he jumped when I dribbled the hose near him.


Today was the garlic harvest. When the leaves have dried out part way up the stalk, it's time to go.

So I dug up my one giant garlic plant.


It smelled sooooo good.

I hung it in the baby pine while I worked in the garden and thought about what to do with it....

I've enjoyed the plant in my garden and hate to end it. Maybe it can just hang in the tree until....??

24.

1. got up when I wanted to
2. slipped into my cool one piece thingy with no belts, buttons, etc. Combed my hair with my fingers making me serviceable enuf to answer the door.
3. checked my email to see who wrote me in the middle of the night.
4. Xanga, Staples, Cabelas, Huffington Post
5. fixed coffee and a half an avacado
6. settled down to wake up
7. meandered through The Commoner by John Burnham Schwartz which I had finished but didn't want to leave. A loosley disguised story about Michiko, the pretty, tennis playing girl who married the crown prince of Japan in 1959...the last free choice she had. Life behind the palace walls was no fairy tale....(Schwartz also wrote Reservation Road, made into a movie)
8. watched a minute of The View...until they all began to talk at once about the octo mon....I turned it off.
9. it's not eleven yet and it's 90 outside
10. wandered into the bedroom and made the bed....it looks cooler when made
11. went outside to give my friends a drink, turn on some sprinklers, let a hose dribble into the fishpond to give them a tickle.
12. tried to think of something for dinner but couldn't hold on to the vaporous thought and it drifed away
13. checked my email again got mail from a (computer) club member giving me a little job to do
14. headed downstairs to work on a watercolor of roses and watch my soaps
15. it's started off to be a lovely day.

23.
Ari's gone!
Gone!
get a grip
Nary a sign of her, nor her gossamer nest of golden babies. I can not believe it...I'm bummed.
Don't you just hate it when your pet spider disappears?
and don't be getting me a new one, I'm not ready.
...remember me tho short I lived....
I will, Ari.

annnnnnnd, I haven't written about him, but my pollywog is gone too!
I knew him when he was no bigger than a tadpole....haha...no, I meant no bigger than a mosquito wiggler. An undiscerning eye wouldn't have noticed him among the hoy poloi but I caught that little swagger right away. He grew and grew and was the size of a fat little pea, and coal black.
I think Bekka drank him.
What losses I've had, and all within 24 hours.
...my baby fish, Ari, and my little blackeyed pea.

Too sad to trod the garden path
To pass my friend's sweet places
The pond....the leaf where Ari lived
I miss their happy faces.
(I made that up...yep!)

22.
One of my baby fish died....I don't know why...The ceremony had evidently already started when I arrived....he was lying in state in the center of the fishpond surrounded by pink waterlilies...I scooped him up with the fishnet and gave him a proper Viking send off...a mighty right hand swing over the fence into the wild woods....ahh he was a beautiful sight...sailing through the setting sun into his Valhalla. Rest in peace my little buckeroo

Ari's nest it is a-changin'...her babies are growing. If you click on this picture to enlarge it you can see the shadowy bumps of the spiderlings.
(spellcheck says spiderlings isn't a word...well, it should be.)



The following picture is of a
Ctenucha multifaria, pronounced "middle size, day flying, hawk moth not found in the east."
Now you know as much as I do about him, and more than most people. He doesn't venture much farther east than my back yard....monarchs migrate three thousand miles, but nucha can't catch a bus to Nebraska.
Here he's sharing the lavender with a honeybee.
The garden is droning on in the hot summer sun...nothing new going on...I cut back all the Becky shastas but their filly headed cousins, the Crazy Daisies persevere....I'll take back everything I said about them....and the black eyed susans are just unbelievable...strong, bright and forever.

It's so sad to go through the plant sections of grocery stores...seeing the leggy, thirsty plants...half forgotten now that the rush of spring planting is over...How come we never see pictures of sad plants in the paper like we do the pets at the human society? They need adopting, too. Do you know plants cry?

Well, maybe that was a dew drop come to think of it. But, don't be rash in your sneering. Our minds are so little we can't even understand time, so how do we know plants don't have some sort of chemical communication system unknown to us. They are alive and that's a good enough start for me.

21.
one hour plus one pail of weeds...today two pails...minimum time to be spent in garden daily.
I should spend that much time working on the house...
heck, I should spend that much time working in the kitchen.

But five years of owning and cooking in a bowling alley snack bar,
and five years of owning and cooking in a cowboy cafe in eastern oregon
should earn anyone time off in the kitchen forever....
but I digress.
I went over to the

(I know, it needs repainting)

anyway, Ari has her nest on one of the leaves and I wanted to see if her babies had hatched yet.

Yesterday I noticed her sister moved into the neighborhood, just two leaves down, and was beginning to raise a family, too.... but, sad to say, sis's babies are gone today. Clean gone...no trace of nest, but sis is still hanging around so I don't think this was a good thing. Home invasion..

anyway, Ari was off the nest, taking a break about three inches away, reclining in the shadow of the stem. As soon as she saw me loom up, she scurried right up and wrapped her arms around the nest.

precious, huh? As if she had a snowball's chance if I were a preditor.

I thought this might make a perfect mother's day card because just look at the shape of that leaf...wow...hearts and love all in one shot.

No?

20.
I have nothing to say today.
Rat: so shut up
Pat: people with blogs don't have to shut up... besides, I can always make things up.
My garden had a vote just before I went out this morning....They voted me the best thing that ever happened to them....and gave me a big bouquet of flowers.
Rat: I'm outta here!


Rat is my alter ego. I developed a split personality when I was teaching...I had to come up with something that would explain certain cranky days.

Mrs. Hentges: "Class, I'm sorry about this morning....that was my twin sister Rat that was here teaching."
Class: "We know, Mrs. Hentges."
Mrs. Hentges: She hid my shoes and I couldn't get to school."
Class: "Yes, Mrs. Hentges."

this is Rat in her "Don't Bug Me" hat. When she had that hat on, you could not come up to the desk and bug her.



I do have a little garden thingy. When I was out weeding I found a little garden spider guarding her nest of eggs...all bound up in spider silk.
When I first saw her she had just one delicate little leg on the nest...she must have sensed me because she moved further on to cover them.

This morning I checked on little Ari (Arachne) and she was totally covering the nest, but she looked a little deflated. I was worried she was dead so I tickled her with a blade of grass, and she giggled.....
so..not to worry.



Speaking of bugs in the garden...I also saw a dead bee right smack in the center of a daisy...yes sirree...laying on his side on the yellow velvety, polleny center...What a way to go!

19.
A mixed set of pix

How many times can you drop a camera before it quits working?
I'm counting.
My next camera is going to have a bulletproof case and a
zoooooooom lens.

Today the most happiest of surprises in my fishpond.
The pond brutalized by the raccoon....but I'll take back some of what I said about him.
He didn't eat all my fish.
Just traumatized them into hiding for a few days.

I went to The Frog Prince and bought five feeder fish for a dollar.
Brought them home and put three in the big pond and two in the nursery pond.
This afternoon I went out to see how everyone was getting along and
wowiezowie! I had twenty or more babies sky hooting all over the place ...
and my three old gold fish placidly grazing.
Those three goldfish are almost neon they are so deeply orange...
a combination of the sun and the wild goodies they eat....just like the egg yolk color from free range chickens...vivid.
But...back to the babies...from whence they came? I haven't a clue....well, yeah, a clue, but it's still a bit of a mystery.
Gold fish lay eggs
and then they eat them.
I never dreamed of having babies, but somehow a handful survived.
Gold fish eat babies.
....lordy, someone must have layed a thousand eggs and just got tired of eating fish for dinner every night.

It only takes two to under seven days for an egg to hatch...and some of these babies are soooo tiny you can barely see them...but some are older, and some are even older.
Fish For Sale
All of the babies are dark. Just like some foals are born dark and don't get their mama's color until they age, goldfish don't become their true color until they age a bit either.

Once upon a time I dug a hole and stuck a hose in it...
and now I have a whole, healthy ecosystem.
Fish darting around eating, snails sliding over aglea covered rocks, water lilies blooming, beautiful red dragon flies flitting over the surface....I feel like Mother Earth.

Today's lily...so lovely


The old birdhouse, refurbished, and relocated.
But the squirrels empty it speedily...and the dropped seeds are sprouting weeds....so I have to rethink this.
Maybe I'll just stick a candle in it, and it can be a garden light...or not.
Notice the tall elephant garlic growing next to it?....taller than I am at five,five.

Here is a closeup of the garlic bloom.

Several years ago I planted two or three buds

and nothing happened. I forgot them and started building my garden around them. They must have like the company because zoom! This one shot out of the ground and grew really fast.

I've never raised garlic and am looking forward to digging it up.

A rare flower cultivated by only our family. Not available
Family: Hentgesrosamultiflower
Genus: Rudolphispanic

Species: Femalewonder

Common Name: Holland Isla (Hollydolly)

18.

Foxy Days
A friend of mine sent these great red fox pictures. Her husband saw the animal very early in the morning going past their place...he grabbed a camera and we are the happy beneficiaries.

They live near us, as the crow flies, and I know we have the same foxes living in the woods near us...but they are shy and it's rare to get such great shots. She/he has something in its mouth...probably breakfast...or maybe taking it home to the kits. Foxes eat any and everything.


Still on the subject of foxes, here is my greatgranddaughter Holland.
This was her first trip to the Portland Zoo.
kissykissyfoxiebaby

17.

Enlarge picture by clicking on it, then imagine this creature as big as a hawk.
They were, hundreds of millions of years ago...fossils have been found in Kansas...these are predatory carnivores
but romantic myths abound of their supernatural powers and unusual talents.


Remember, in your childhood, when your mother told you if you didn't shut up these "darning needles" would sew your mouth shut. No? Whoops...only my mother did? hmmmmm.....My father also told me I only had so many words allotted to me and if I didn't shut up they'd be gone before I got out of kindergarten.....that's probably why I'm typing all the time now.


I saw both of these creatures in the same spot by the fishpond, within hours of each other.....I read they were territorial...maybe Black ScaryFace chased the other one away...who knows...

These large red eyes have thousands and thousands of lenses and can see 360 degrees. When I moved near him, he raised his eyes up, making it look like he was seeing me....eerie

17.

she loves me she loves me not she loves me she loves me not
this year next year sometime never
Happy Daisies



My daisies in one hundred degree weather.
They curl their little petals down tightly making them look just like fried eggs...
which is what they probably feel like.

Little Button

15.

The Fourth of July
that means Sally and Bekka get to sleep over


the best looking thing in the garden this morning was the weed pail....a bouquet of leftovers...unwanted sweetpea, old roses, sheared veronica, leggy yellow angelina blossoms , broken daisies......
what a sad phrase...broken daisies.


..... at the teaparty
we keep birdseed on the fence posts


taken through a window...outlined in light


patient Bekka waiting

14.

Dragonfly
Click on this picture and enlarge it to really appreciate the beauty of the wings.

After my disastrous morning in the garden, this guy made me forget it all. I usually have bright neon blue damselflies flitting around the lilypads, but when this orangy red dragonfly landed on a lily bud not six inches from me I was agog....yep...that awkward, strange word agog says it all.

In the above picture he is hanging on a spent lily blossom of his very same color. I have no idea what he was thinking or doing...(yes, I can usually tell what a dragonfly is thinking...haha)

Although they are carniverous and care naught for flowers, he'd fly off and return again and again to the same lily, almost in the same spot.

Something was drawing him back....my presence?... my natural mind connections with dragonflies...hmmmm....probably not.

I like the above picture...the lighting...his angle...

Some people can get dragonflies to land on their fingers...

probably the same kind of people who can get hummers to land on their hands...but not the same kind of people who are holding cameras, snapping like crazy, wondering if Nat'l Geo is buying dragonfly pix these days.