#skol

there are few things i like less than pro football. but come on. that was magic last night. am i really going to say this? sigh. ok. go vikings. win the damn super bowl.

purple calla lilly

negative or positive

i can’t decide if this is something everyone will see, or whether its just something that jumped out to me, but i looked at this porcupine quill for a long time and then looked away to answer a question, and when i looked back, it was no longer a porcupine quill but a zipper rip in the middle of white fabric. what’s the negative space? what’s the positive space? apparently it depends on whether you’ve just tried to answer a question about factoring trinomials from your 8th grader.

african porcupine quill

let be

occasionally there will be a study trying to quantify just how much money nature saves us by simply being itself. what would it costs us in effort, treasure, and ingenuity if we had to replace the sun’s energy, or fertilize all of our food by hand, or farm our woods and waters. or store the nutrients the soil absorbs and apply them correctly. it’s mind boggling to think about, and it makes working with nature, instead of trying to improve her, seem like such a sensible idea. let gravity be gravity and find ways to minimize how much we need to fight it. in the same way, i sometimes think about how much more work i’d have to do if nature didn’t blossom, grow, age, and die so overwhelmingly picturesquely. think about trying to engineer the shapes and faded colors of these flowers and stems that reached their current state, literally, by sitting in a flat file drawer for a few months, completely ignored.

photo of all the dried botanical bits in my flat-file drawer

bracts

i’m just nerdy enough to be a little fascinated with bracts, those little leaf like growths on linden trees and other plants that aren’t really foliage but aren’t really seeds or berries. mostly i love lindens and basswoods. but did you know that those red poinsettia “leaves” are actually bracts? see, i got you interested didn’t i?

linden tree seeds with bracts

a peek inside

m.f.k. fisher used to toast her tangerines on the radiator of her strasbourg apartment and then bite into them when their skin was dry and crackly and their insides were still cool and bursting with juice. nothing like that really happened this afternoon when i tried to peel away the skin of this tangerine in order to open a slightly suggestive window onto the inside of this fruit. instead, i tore a raggedy hole in the side of the tangerine, and bruised the wedges of interior flesh into a lustrous sheen. oh well. we’re not all m.f.k. fisher.

tangerine with leaves (Citrus tangerina)