roy and g but not biv

this guy tried really hard to fill in the whole rainbow spectrum. pretty hard to blame him for not managing blue, indigo and violet. he just didn’t have the tools.

sumac leaves in fall transition colors

lake valentine, arden hills, minnesota

interior design

there is nothing particularly noteworthy about this nest except that it was in fact this exact rusty red color throughout. i have not altered the color in any way in the course of post-processing. which means that some sparrow chose to make its nest by choosing only grasses of this particular russet hue. it must have been a bird that did not need things to be perfect (there are a good number of loose strands), but that had certain opinions about the importance of palette when it came to decorating her home. a kindred spirit, in other words.

small (probably sparrow) nest found on the ground after a storm

minneapolis, minnesota

ragged sunlight

the sun has been working hard for a an entire summer now, and i am here to give it permission, as if it needed permission from me, to look a little ragged now that we have reached september. hey, take some time off. maybe visit us a few times over the winter. see you next year. should we say april-ish?

pinnate prairie coneflower flower heads

st. paul, minnesota

love spell

among other things, apparently a “holey,” or “hagstone” (a stone with a naturally created hole in it) represents the sacred vagina of the great goddess. if the internet is correct, it seems i can stick a small, precisely fitting twig into one of these “holeys,” (imitating an act not generally associated with sticks and stones), and then i can throw the resulting coupled bit of nature into the sea, in order to create a very powerful love spell. true love, apparently will come to me sometime afterwards. i’m not sure quite how to proceed, since true love has already come to me, and we have spent the last 28 years together. what if i toss a twig-impaled hagstone into the sea, and the universe sends me a “true love,” wearing dockers and a golf cap, who quotes lines from Happy Gilmore, and wants to tell me about his awesome last trip to vegas? no, i think i’ll store these hagstones chastely in a box in my basement, where they can do whatever they want with their sacred vaginas.

hag stones

mediterranean beach near sète, france

a very specific kind of nightmare

these angelica stems (or should I say “trunks”) lined the bank of a trout stream that my two boys (husband and son) were fishing last week. angelica can reach nine feet tall and might be the tallest wildflower in minnesota. when i asked the boys to cut two or three of the striking plants down for me, they fell into long laments about the nightmarish flower heads, which seem to come alive behind a fisherman’s back and reach out to grab his back-cast, and then wrap his line in tangled balls around their stems. apparently an artist’s graphically beautiful silhouette, is a fisherman’s treacherous nightmare. who knew.

angelica (Angelica atropurpurea)

river falls, wisconsin