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)

How many nicknames do you have?

Common mullein has the most nicknames of any plant I have come ever across: cowboy toilet paper, hig candlewick, Indian rag weed, bullicks lungwort, Adams-rod, hare’s-beard, ice-leaf, woolly mullein, velvet mullein, blanket mullein, beggar’s blanket, Moses’ blanket, poor man’s blanket, Our Lady’s blanket, old man’s blanket, feltwort, flannel.  I come from a family where everyone had nicknames. Mine was Mickey (for Mickey Mouse). How about? Do you have any nicknames?

common mullein (Verbascum thapsus)

Let’s go to the beach!

My high school Spanish text book was titled Vamos a la Playa!  (Let’s Go to the Beach!) It’s interesting the tidbits we remember. And equally interesting, the things we forget. We have two book launches going on simultaneously in our house right now. So there is no beach time for us this summer. Luckily, I have several glass jars filled with sea glass from previous summers. One of my happy places is late afternoon on a beach, sifting through handfuls of sand in search of buried jewels of sea glass.

sea glass from the Mediterranean