on knowing your grains

according to wiki, the grass family contains over 9,000 species distributed throughout the world. of that, 35 have been cultivated as cereals. i am sheepish to admit that i can only recognize about 5 of them by sight: wheat, corn, oats, rice and rye.  after that, i would be pretty much guessing. humans started cultivating wheat and barley in the levant (syria) about 9000 years ago. at the same time, east asia was domesticating rice and millet. yup, i said 9000 years. 9000 years man has been living in co-dependence with these plants (they allowed for increased populations, leading to larger societies, and eventually the development of cities.) they are at the root of modern civilization. and i can’t even confidently recognize barley. #sad

canada rye

before dawn

i am not a morning person. but i like getting out for my daily walk early in the morning if i can. it would be reasonable to assume it is because i want to avoid the afternoon heat, or maybe i want to have the trails to myself. and those would be pretty good guesses. but those are not the primary reasons. the main reason is that a whole lot happens in nature after dark. there is often quoted book by christopher booker who postulated that there are really only seven types of stories:

• Overcoming the Monster
• Rebirth
• Quest
• Journey and Return
• Rags to Riches
• Tragedy
• Comedy

i think i have come upon examples of all of those in the remains and detritus i find on the the trails first thing in the morning. a strong breeze will often scatter most of the clues, so by mid-morning there is barely a hint of the drama that played out the night before. the story of this particular mallard was clearly a tragedy. but the osprey or eagle that feasted on him could have been any one of those story types. in my still-groggy mind this morning, i was pretty sure it was a rags to riches story. a hungry juvenile osprey, down on his luck with fishing, desperate for food, snatched this sleeping mallard and filled his belly for the first time in days–a veritable feast for a bird almost the same size as the duck. my osprey was king for a night. the end.

mallard wing

unfurl

i have a potted palm on my deck. it’s one of those you can buy at ikea or home depot for ten dollars. i don’t think much of it in the summer because i am surrounded by an abundance of lush green flora. but i will pull it inside come winter, and it will be a welcome bit of green in my mostly black and white world. and i will dote on it. i will pay close attention to its well being. i will keep its soil moist. and i will move it around the house so it can always get the most of our limited northern light. but today i realized my summertime benign neglect has has been misguided. there won’t be any new growth in winter. so if i hadn’t stopped to look at these newly unfurling leaflets today, i would have missed a little bit magic.

young palm leaflets just opening

granola bars for wood ducks

our house sits deeply surrounded by 30 acres of dense woods, much of it oak. we’ve been in this house for 13 years. on occasion over those years, but not every year, the acorns will all fall from the trees in great profusion in a very short span of time. if i dug into it, i assume i could find some kind of correlation between rainfall, average temperatures, and early or late arrivals of spring that would unravel the mystery of why some years this happens and not others. in any case, this is one of those years. acorns have been raining down so hard, and so fast, that i can literally shovel them from my deck with a snow shovel. two days ago, during the thunderstorm, i said to my son “hey joe, i think it’s hailing”. he replied impatiently “mom, it’s the acorns.” they fall from such heights, that they hit the roof and sound like ping pong sized hail. as in most things in life, there is an upside and a downside to this phenomenon. while we can’t enjoy sitting on our deck during this week of hail, on the other hand, just as the hailstorm ends, we are almost always rewarded with humorous hordes of invading wood ducks marching across our lawn as they gorge themselves on the abundant feast before heading south. like energy bars for wood ducks.

bur oak acorns at the end of august

and now for something different

this isn’t a typical STILL blog photo. i had actually been eying the cone flowers beside my public library for a few days. but as i pulled out of the gas station today, this copse of sumac trees blowing in the wind, against a cloudy sky, with all of the angled undersides of the leaves catching the light just so, caught me eye and i couldn’t look away. i did an illegal u-turn to turn around an snap this photo on my iphone. i love how tropical it looks. against a white northern sky.

sumac leaves blowing in the wind (Rhus typhina)