our fifteen year old just returned from a five day visit to her grandparents in palm springs, california. i asked her to gather what she could for STILL blog between her daily poolside appointments. i love what she came up with.  she avoided the non-native landscaped palm springs, and instead hiked out to the foothills for the desert sages and smoke weed. she gets me.

palm springs desert assemblage

palm springs, california

in the spring, summer, and fall one or several of us will often choose to sleep on the screen porch. sleeping on the screen porch means, among other things, being awakened at the break of dawn by a very emphatic, and very loud, red squirrel. he leaps from the white oak to the maple, races along the maple branches outside the porch, then hops into the white cedar growing up along the corner post, and decides that any sleepers in his vicinity are either a threat, or have simply slept too long. the wake-up call is a deafening and incessant trill–equal parts charming and infuriating. today we found this fearless red squirrel in the driveway, dead.  he was intact except for one small bloody spot near his chest. if i had to guess, i would say he had been stealing chicken feed again, and one of the girls gave him a quick, vicious peck to show him who was boss. now, after two years of complaining about the din every morning, i am suddenly concerned about the lack of noise. was this our cedar tree squirrel just trying to get a free meal after a hard winter?? i almost don’t want to find out next summer.

american red squirrel and his luxurious mahogany tail

saint paul, minnesota

one late-march step on the long march toward spring.

tree buds on the first day of spring: cottonwood, lilac, poplar, siberian elm, ?, ?, oak

rice creek regional trail, saint paul, minnesota

another winter storm advisory today. so i went searching for inspirations among my collections rather than risking the bad weather.  my nature collections are sort of like putting up preserves for the winter–picked during peak season, and saved for later.  march can get a little “hungry” in minnesota, and these preserves make for good sustenance.

color wheel: red stag horn sumac, violet shells, blue jay feathers, green linden leaves, yellow rose petals and daffodil flowers, orange maple leaves

people give me nests. sometimes they  find them on the ground following a bad storm. sometimes they pry them from the crotch of a grape vine stump during the grape harvest. sometimes they rescue them from an urban shrubbery about to be pruned. and this year in particular, they plucked them from the fallen branches of snow-snapped trees. i love receiving these gifts. they often arrive on my doorstep in leftover boxes. i can recognize them before i even get out of the car–a clearly recycled open topped box placed just-so beside the front door. please keep them coming.

a precarious stack of gifted bird nests

all from minnesota, usa or languedoc, france