the rules have changed

my husband and son brought this plant home from a trout fishing expedition. hey, we have a plant for you to photograph, they said. so i brought out my 4×4 black tagboard and a camera, then watched them drag a six foot tall plant like a lacy bamboo tree out the hatchback of our car. well, i thought. the rules have changed. fortunately we just painted the exterior of our house black. so i had steve stand like a sentinel with his right arm extended horizontally, holding a plant as tall as himself, as i snapped a few dozen photos of this freak of nature.

wild angelica

tiling

as a former aerospace engineer, i see this fish and i think about the space shuttle. that’s totally normal, right? i mean the fish’s scales shed water aerodynamically (sorry, i mean hydrodynamically) in the same way that the space shuttle’s tiles used to shed the 2300 degree F heat of re-entry. its all just good engineering. we as a species are very good engineers. but you know who is a better engineer? her name is evolution.

loup de mer (mediterranean sea bass)

that kind of mood

what i first saw when i picked these bee balm flowers were the tonsured heads of monks, with bald heads and rings of hair. that analogy is a stretch, i see now. the heads are too small, and the hair too long and colorful, unless this was a particularly punk rock order of monks. maybe i leaped to the image so quickly because i have been feeling an urge to go monastic myself lately. we are trying to put our thumbs in all the little holes in the dyke, and yet the news and the distractions and the streams of unhelpful data keep leaking in. maybe i need to shave my head, and declare myself the abbott of a new sect. everyone welcome. no phones. one daily walk required. creativity encouraged. silence until dinner. then we all talk until late. follow me, my children…

bee balm (monarda)

turtle lake, shoreview, minnesota

the most wonderful time of the year

i’ll trade you christmas for tomato season. i’ll throw in mother’s day and valentine’s day too. deal?

tomatoes

this is your annual reminder

i know i see this plant every year, and i’m pretty sure i look it up most years, and yet right now it is everywhere, from roadsides to prairies to medians to ditches, and i just had to look it up again, like that third cousin’s husband at the family reunion where, every year,  you have to put your mouth near your husband’s ear and stage whisper, “don’t look now, but what’s the name of that guy in the cargo shorts and the bad goatee, the one who’s married to margo?”

foxtail barley (Hordeum jubatum)