specimen table companions

these dried bits found themselves crowded together on my specimen table. they must have realized they made a striking group, because they made sure i noticed them by catching the light and winking at me.

on a marginally related topic, we are listening to the book Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson.  we are halfway into the 15-hour book and we are all enthralled. if i have taken away one lesson so far it is that da vinci was, among all his other gifts, an almost superhuman noticer of the natural world. i could die happy if i attained even a shadow of his skill in just that one area. i’ll never paint the virgin of the rocks. but i could start noticing not just what species my local birds are and what color their feathers, but whether their wings beat faster on the downstroke or the upstroke. that’s just one of the things he noticed with the naked eye on the way to discovering how a bird’s wing created lift centuries before bernoulli put his name to the principle. it’s maybe the most refined case of simply noticing something that i’ve ever heard of.

bits and pieces from my specimen table

a walk home from the american consulate in milano

i gathered these leaves during the walk back to our hotel from the u.s. consulate in milan where we had gone to apply for new passports. i gathered them from the sidewalks in the urban center during a persistent drizzling rain. we had just survived a fairly major setback. it’s not every day that you get your passports stolen in a foreign c0untry by a street thief, and as a result can’t really return to your second home (in france) in order to arrive eventually in your primary home (in the u.s.) until you move through a heavy gauntlet of bureaucracy. and yet, the artistic habit had me looking not at the sky to lament my fate, but at the ground to sort through some pretty interesting fallen leaves. still blog is not just a daily habit, but a distraction from some of the ways that the world tries to redirect your gaze from the important, by presenting you with the urgent.

autumn leaves from one walk in milano

milano

my son loves fashion, and we had never visited milan before, so we took advantage of an extended french “toussaint” school holiday to make the 8 hour run along the french coast into italy and north into milan. not 15 minutes after arriving, while still driving our car to the hotel, a guy on a motorcycle punctured the sidewall of our tire (we would piece all of this together later), then followed us until we had to pull over, and, after pretending to help my husband as he replaced the tire with a spare, this lovely older gentleman suddenly disappeared into thin air. it wasn’t until we began putting our things back into the car, with the tire changed, that i discovered he had made off with my purse, in which i was carrying my wallet, 300 euros of cash, all my credit cards, and, the icing on the cake, all three of our passports. believe it or not, we were able to get all of our cards canceled, take out enough cash to make it through the stay, order a new tire and have it installed at a repair shop, and get three brand new emergency passports from the u.s. consulate in milan. then we finished our trip, ate three good meals, visited the galleria vittorio emannuele ii, walked the most expensive retail street in europe, the via monte napoleone, and drank the best coffee of our trip so far, after two-plus months of pretty mediocre french coffee. although living well is supposedly the best revenge, i would still give up some living well in order to spend maybe half an hour in a concrete room with a fly swatter and a naked milanese man with a scruffy beard, asking him how he likes robbing mary jo hoffman now. and now. and now. how about now? then i would wipe my fingers under my chin at him, and walk away.

chestnut /châtaigne

rulebreaker not lawbreaker (maybe)

these giant agave plants are plentiful here in southern france. but they tend to grow on the edges of roads, stone walls, and hedgerows and as a result, get pretty banged up by tractors, people, and cars. this one, growing in a fenced-off abandoned garden on the outskirts of our village, has been left to grow undisturbed. i see only one scar on it. the full plant is a sculptural beauty. but i was only able to photograph it through the garden fence, and so caught only the tips. i am a rule breaker, not a lawbreaker. even so, i may, or may not, (or may) be working on my fence-jumping trespassing skills.

giant agave

essence

i plucked the leaves from these eucalyptus branches to reveal the young seed heads hiding among the foliage.  i am smitten with the delicate bouquet that emerged. if i had a wedding right now, i would make a bouquet like this. simple, elegant, pared to its essence.

eucalyptus seeds