acts of service

have you taken the love languages test? if not, i recommend it. my love language is “acts of service.”  last night i agreed to help my husband steve set up a better work flow system for his off-tax season writing career. in exchange, he asked “what can i do for you?”.  i suggested he take a walk around the yard and gather everything that caught his eye and represented what nature was doing in exactly this place, on exactly this day. he did that, and then stuck around to  help me make a spring STILL assemblage. a worthy double act of service.

spring gatherings from one walk on may 10, 2020

abundance

every year i wrestle with how to convey the utter exuberance that is crabapple blossom season. and every year the images i photograph look like colorful chaos, and not joyful abundance. this year was no exception. i spent an hour posing branches this way and that before i finally admitted defeat. so i plucked the blossoms from the stems and tossed them on white paper, and click click click. i like the results. yay chaos. joyful abundance, you can kiss my ass.

crabapple blossoms (Malus)

grounded

these are the wing feathers of a mallard drake who had strolled through our yard twice a day with his mate since their joint arrival this spring. we had come to look forward to their early evening passeggiata, and made inane conversation with them as they wandered by. then one day, it was just mama duck walking toward us across the back yard. and the next day we discovered a pile of feathers next to the dock. in this season of so many losses, we took this one particularly hard.

mallard wing feathers

merrybells keep ringing

one of my discoveries after i spent a weekend cleaning up our woods was a scattered collection of these bellworts, aka “merrybells.” my neighbor tells me the woods used to be full of them, before the buckthorn took over. she also said that there were so many bracken ferns that a local nursery arrived every year to dig more up and sell them. the bad news is that the carpet of bracken ferns is gone. the good news is that mary jo hoffman loves ferns, and just discovered that she can carpet her woods with them.

sessile-leaved bellwort (Uvularia sessilifolia)

division day

trillium is my husband’s favorite flower. it is a native minnesota woodland wildflower. for as long as we can remember, we have had one healthy and hardy bunch of trillium in our side-yard. last night we learned that the best way to propagate trillium is through division. and that, counter to conventional wisdom, spring is as good a time as any to do it. so, today you get trilium. just dug up. about to be divided. beautiful. and ephemeral.

trillim