large brown things

This may gross some of you out…but this collection of large-brown-things has been pushed into the corder of my kitchen (sort of tucked out of the way under the counter) since mid-winter. You may recognize some of the subjects. The two robin nests were added this spring. As part of my cleaning efforts yesterday, I finally pulled them out of their hiding spot and decided the haphazard collection was it’s own kind of beautiful. STILL beautiful.

bracket mushrooms, deer spine, robin nests, turkey feathers, burdock leaf

you could have been a star

If you look at yesterday’s post of the “sweeps” from my kitchen floor, you will see this daylily flower amongst the debris. When I was editing that photo, this humble daylily, dried and faded, grabbed my attention. The petals looked like gathered silk-tulle and chiffon-organza, something Carrie Bradshaw would have worn on Sex and the City.

dried daylily flower (Hemerocallis)

letting down

I am letting down after a three week stretch of back-to-back book launch events for my husband’s new book (A Season for That). It’s a rainy day. A perfect day to sweep the slate clean. These are the remains of my previous two weeks of STILL still laying on my kitchen floor. Today I will sweep it all up, mop the floor, and start afresh tomorrow. Have you heard the expression “outer order, inner calm” ?  Well, it applies to me. If my environment is cluttered and in disarray, I feel the same on the inside. So, my rainy day of sweeping the house clean will be both a symbolic end to our busy stretch and a cleansing restart for my cluttered mind. Outer order, inner calm.

stubbing STILL

Oops! I see that some of you arrived this morning to see “blah” in the details section. Let me explain:  After I have finished editing my photo for the day, I will often pull it into WordPress right then, even if I don’t have time at the moment to finish writing the full post. In all the WordPress windows that need words , I simply enter blah (shorthand for blah blah blah). I call is “stubbing STILL.”  Steve will often ask around dinner time “have you posted STILL yet?”, and I will answer “It’s stubbed.” Which means I have taken and edited a photo, pulled it into WordPress, but I haven’t finished  writing the post. So, dear reader, IF you see “blah”, it simply means my evening got busier or later than I though it would, and I never made it back online to finish writing the post. It happens very infrequently, but it does happen. It does not mean I am down, or depressed, or feeling blah. Quite the contrary, it usually means I have been too engaged elsewhere to finish my beloved STILL for the day. Yesterday, I “stubbed” STILL before I went to meet Steve at another of his Book Launch events. The event was crowed, ran long, and by the time we returned home I fell into bed having forgotten that STILL was only stubbed. Now you you know the rest of the story.

Queen Anne’s Lace stem and flower buds (Daucus carota)

A Gift from the Sky

Have you ever read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s exquisite little book called A Gift from the Sea? If not, I recommend it. Drawing inspiration from the the shells on the shore, Lindbergh muses on the many roles women inhabit. It was written over 50 years ago, but still holds up today.  This blue Jay feather fell from the sky. It has got me thinking if a modern re-make of the book wouldn’t be a good idea? This time, with feathers instead of sea shells as the prompts for each essay. Naturally, it would be called A Gift from the Sky.

blue jay feathers (Cyanocitta cristata)