i promised steve that i wouldn’t speak engineer again this time, despite the beautifully algorithmic curve of the tip of this no-longer fiddlehead, not-yet fern. i’m sure the hummingbirds who will come to harvest the fluff from the stems will not be thinking about formulas or divine proportions, but about the comfort of a perfectly lined nest.

fiddlehead ferns in may

my yard, saint paul, minesota

spruce pollen cones have been friends of mine for a very short time. i discovered them hanging like cherries from a row of spring spruces sometime between the beginning of still blog in 2012 and today. they were strangers for almost an entire lifetime, and then suddenly, thanks to this strange new phenomenon of sharing creativity online, they were friends. yesterday, i spent a long, easy, riveting afternoon with two new friends: shannon @_shannongrant, and talin @springfinnandco, who had been strangers for almost an entire lifetime, and who suddenly, thanks to design*sponge and instagram, are friends. and not just friends but, i want to say, mates. women who naturally see the world from a perspective i recognize. so which is it? i don’t know. sometimes, when homework is finished and piano is practiced, i watch the online world reach out and take my son away from me, while he sits in an armchair across the room, and i think that digital media is like a predator on the savannah, separating us one by one from our herd, and eating us alive. and then i take a morning walk and it is the season for spruce pollen cones, and i spend that afternoon in a studio with shannon and talin and no sense of time passing, and it seems as if the online world has strewn the path of the second half of my life with fruitfulness and friendship.

spruce male pollen cone (in early may)

sucker lake regional trail, saint paul, minnesota

i didn’t intend to revisit my engineering roots again today, but i found my first horsetail shoots of the season yesterday afternoon, alongside sucker creek, and aside from the fact that this newly emergent specimen looks like something designed by the engineers at nasa, i will never forget the thrill of learning that horsetail’s hyperregular growth pattern may have been what first inspired john napier’s discovery of logarithms back in the 1600s. in fact, this telescoping stem would make a great pattern for a solid rocket booster. hmm. i still know some guys at nasa…

horsetail

sucker lake trail, saint paul, minnesota

no, says my right-brain inner artist, to my left-brain engineer. no, you can’t tidy up that “mess” in the lower left corner. that’s what creates the tension that makes the whole photo work. to which my inner engineer responds by sullenly moving the lower right petal of the almost perfect grid one millimeter nor’nor’west, while waiting for my inner artist to come to her senses.

dried rose petals

we let our chickens out for a little bit every evening, and then watch them browse. we call it chick tv, and yes it is that entertaining. in their pursuit of tender greens and juicy bugs, the girls follow aimless looking paths very similar to the paths of these bark beetles, who were engaged in very much the same activity underneath the bark of a cottonwood tree. there must be something evolutionary about this kind of meandering. maybe a crooked path avoids ever eating too much of one (possibly dangerous) thing. or maybe wandering, even in the claustrophobic darkness between bark and cambium, is just so pleasurable that those who do it live longer and pass on more robust and joyful genes.

bark beetle traces on dead cottonwood limb

pike island, saint paul, minnesota