i am drawn to minimalism in part because the world sometimes overwhelms me. too much noise, too much choice, too many people, too many errands, too many emails, too many invitations, too many deadlines. i just want to go home to my white walls and my green yard, and my blue lake, and i want to take a long breath, sitting next to my husband with the kids nearby. sometimes i turn to STILL blog as a relief from all of that, but this particular july, at the height of the finest growing season this area has seen in living memory, even the choices out there in the woods are overwhelming. so today i responded by going through my collection of dried plants, and made a kind of order in a messy little corner of my work table. it’s all good.

saint paul, minnesota

ma’am, the bug that flew into your eye. please think back. its wings. were they translucent or opaque? what color were they? did the bug in question make a buzzing sound or more of a fluttering sound? think hard now. ok ma’am, please come with me. now look through the window at this line of bugs. does one of these look familiar? take your time. we’re in no hurry.

line up of july bugs

saint paul, minnesota

it’s hard to imagine the deliciousness of the tomato, probably my favorite food, among the members of the poisonous nightshade family. seriously, don’t you look at this unripe bunch of grape tomatoes and think how sweet they’ll be when they turn red? spoiler alert. they will not turn red. they will turn dark blue, and they will kill you. this branch sat for a couple of days on my front passenger seat, next to my beloved dog, until i realized what it was. the incident reminded me of that time when our daughter was about two years old, and we stayed at a friend’s cabin in northern minnesota. we were gathering some local wildflowers to press and photograph, including what we thought was a beautiful spray of cow parsnip. when we finally identified the plant positively, we realized that the spray of greenery lying on the table right next to our angelically napping daughter was in fact water hemlock. the first line of the description in our wildflower book went as follows: “water hemlock: this is one of the most deadly poisonous plants in the u.s. to both humans and animals.” we felt pretty proud of ourselves that day.

nightshade

saint paul, minnesota

most married couples with kids probably text messages like “can you pick up milk?”, or “what time is johnny’s dentist appointment?” the luckier ones might say things like “how about i pick up indian takeout on my way home?” or “thanks for last night”. my husband sends me texts that say “young spruce cones dripping with sap on hodgson road”. there are all sorts of ways to say “i love you.”

white spruce botanical

saint paul, minnesota

yesterday afternoon, we discovered this little gal bouncing against the inside of our kitchen skylight like an oversized bumblebee. this, of course, was an emergency. we are the kind of household that escorts stray spiders, wasps, and mayflies out the front door so that they may continue their sundry quests for self-fulfillment. a trapped hummingbird represented a next-level crisis that required all hands on deck, and involved a stool, a ladder, a ball jar, a catch-and-release trout net, a tennis racket, a bread board, and, eventually, my husband’s big hands, which plucked the hummingbird gently from its perch, when it had finally settled in precarious exhaustion on a tiny lip of window sill. She posed for about five minutes in the STILL blog studio we  set up on our front step, blinking tiredly, and then lifted her head, glanced around, and thrummed off into the trees. we can report that operation hummingbird ended in complete success.

female ruby-throated hummingbird

saint paul, minnesota