it’s quite amazing what you learn about feathers when you try to put one together. for one thing, they look as if they are shaped like christmas trees, but they are not shaped like that.  they are much longer and slimmer than that. my first effort, with each ascending layer of feathers laid out wider than the one before, was on its way to looking like a wedge, not a feather, before i started over, and actually paid attention to real life feather construction, rather than the imagined feather in my head i was trying to imitate.

found feathers: turkey, owl, eagle, egret, hawk, crow, goose, chicken, pintade, flicker, mallard, woodpecker, cardinal, blue jay

mostly found in minnesota, with a few from southwest france

i asked my husband this evening why he likes bird’s foot trefoils so much. he points them out often at this time of year. he usually has the kind of answer that implies he’s thought things through and come to a very reasoned opinion. “because i know their name,”  he said tonight. ok. good enough.

bird’s-foot-trefoil

pike island, saint paul, minnesota

we have a next door neighbor who, to our horror, cleared an acre of mature hardwoods in order to put in a perfect green lawn. in the inverted moral universe of suburban america, we are bad neighbors because we don’t spend our weekends relentlessly hunting down every last accursed dandelion in our yard, resulting in the occasional puff of airborne seeds that float westward to infest the purity of our our neighbors’ carpet of kentucky bluegrass. the reason we let the dandelions go is that we have some other neighbors, two hives of them to be exact, who rely on dandelions as one of their preferred early season nectar sources. we are, as a result, bad neighbors to our bad neighbors. and good neighbors to our good neighbors. our bad neighbors play by the rules and dutifully mow their yard every week. our good neighbors fly in swarms and have stingers. this makes perfect sense to us. it’s the rest of the world who has it all wrong.

dandelions

everywhere, minnesota

i have spent the last few days scrounging for still blog images. there are times when they just flow, and i find myself in a rhythm where every day presents me with something beautiful and new. then come the dry spells, when i can spend days or weeks feeling as if i am stuck in a dream where you need to run fast to keep up, but your legs won’t respond and it feels as if you are running through molasses. still blog has just completed one of its molasses phases. so what does all that have to do with joseph, my 11 year old son? well, he is a gift in more ways than i have space to discuss, but today, as i dealt with news on multiple fronts, both good and bad, but all of it time consuming, i discovered a maple seedling placed carefully on my mouse pad. it turned out to be exactly the still blog image i needed. i needed a burst of speed today, and joseph was my legs.

sprouting maple seed

saint paul, minnesota