52 weeks – Grongar

52 Photos ~ Powder blue

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These photos and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

52 Photos ~ Busy street

Last week: school.
This week: summer vacation.

Last week: homework.
This week: parties and movies.

Last week: rise before 6.
This week: sleep until the cats insist I rise.

Last week: assigned reading.
This week: thick by-chance novels.

Last week: schedules.
This week: what day is it?

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. Not that some of us don’t still have to work (ahem), but the pace of the day has suddenly slowed. The dog and cats are napping in the sun. The goats are, too.

The previously green blueberries are starting to show a shadow of blue.

The air, momentarily, is still.

Only the bees are busy. And even they are sleeping in late.

52 Photos ~ The light arrived

Burnt Norton – IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
the black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

–T.S. Eliot, from The Four Quartets

52 Photos ~ Good luck charm

While thinking about this theme all week, I realized that I don’t have a good luck charm. I have objects that I love and that hold beauty and meaning for me. I have precious things given to me by people I love and have been loved by. I have mementos that remind me of travels and faraway places.

But I don’t know about luck.

Do I believe in luck? I don’t know that I do. Unless by luck we mean the millions of mutations and evolutions, the decisions and hesitations, the actions, the coincidences, the escapes by and quick thinking of my ancestors that somehow landed me here and now.

I feel pinballed to this point in time. I could have landed anywhere. Or nowhere. A thought that makes the hairs on the back of my neck prickle and gives me a dizzy, groundless feeling.

Luck?

Well yes, I’m lucky as all get out. And my life is charmed.

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This photo and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

52 Photos ~ Sugar

52 Photos ~ Criss Cross

Nest

I walked out, and the nest
was already there by the step. Woven basket
of a saint
sent back to life as a bird
who proceeded to make
a mess of things. Wind
right through it, and any eggs
long vanished. But in my hand it was
intricate pleasure, even the thorny reeds
softened in the weave. And the fading
leaf mold, hardly
itself anymore, merely a trick
of light, if light
can be tricked. Deep in a life
is another life. I walked out, the nest
already by the step.

52 Photos ~ Fire

To approach the beehive, beekeepers light a smoker.

A bee smoker is a little lidded can with a built-in bellows. You start with a piece of crumpled newspaper, light it, and drop it to the bottom of the smoker, then use the bellows to puff puff puff until you get some good licking flames, and then you add the fuel (dried pine needles, dried grass, wood shavings, fuel pellets, what have you), keep puffing and, in minutes (in theory), you get a strong plume of cool-to-the-touch smoke.

In fact, this process takes some practice. It’s easy to get a flame, and then it’s easy to kill the flame. You can get hot smoke and sparks fairly easily, too. But getting the cool, thick, lasting smoke is the trick and we’re finally getting the knack of it. Almost.

When you’ve got consistent smoke, you don the bee suits and head to the hive. Puff the hive entrance where the guard bees are keeping watch, let the smoke seep in. You and the bees are quieting. There’s smoke in the air and it’s the sunny part of the day.

Let the smoke swirl. Lift the lid of the hive. Spread the smoke around the lid, down into the frames. Thousands of bees, busy but calm, focused on their jobs.

And we just can’t look away.

Every time we visit the hive I want more time. There are so many details to absorb, beyond merely tending to the needs of the hive (refilling sugar syrup feeders, removing extraneous comb, checking for eggs and larvae).

Every time we visit the hive we come back with more questions. For instance, do bees sleep? Yes, we read, they do. In fact, you might come across a bee napping in a flower. Imagine that.

We’ve yet to see the queen. Did I tell you we named her Elspeth? She’s marked with a green dot so we have a prayer of seeing her, but so far she’s been hidden, doing her work, surrounded by her attendants.

We check the hive only every three to five days so as not to disturb them too much. And we need to wait for the weather to cooperate; it’s no good to open the hive on a blustery, rainy day.

On hive-check days, I go to bed with the smell of smoke in my hair. The same as on a camping day, or after an evening by the fire pit, roasting marshmallows, watching for meteors, and musing about the dreams of bees.

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This is my first photo in the new series of 52, running from May 2014 to May 2015. If you’re interested in joining (it’s never too late!), check out the 52 Photos Project blog.

These photos and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

52 Photos ~ Clouds

My husband’s people live in a land of cloud watchers, a place in the middle of the country where there are big lakes and scarcely a hill, and all you can see as you drive down the highway is the cloud dappled sky that goes on and goes on. But most of my life I’ve lived on rippled lands where clouds are obscured by hills, mountains, and trees. I spent more time looking down or through than up.

I came to notice clouds gradually, in the way you come to notice the rooms in the house where you grew up, first unaware, taken for granted, and then completely, knowing every corner, hallway, doorframe, and creaking floorboard.

I first learned to love the low clouds we can see most mornings from the porch, the ones that cluster in the eastern sky like grazing sheep, just over the hill, making a fleecy lid for the chilly river. These are the clouds that sometimes forget their place, drifting down into the valley to perch lightly on the trees as fog.

Up early with the animals and my camera, I watched these clouds gather and roam, join and separate. I waited to see if the sun’s first rays would slide out below or above them. I started looking for the subtle moment when grey turns to pink turns to orange turns to white.

Now I find I can’t travel a road without checking out the sky, cataloging the shapes and colors: flat-bottomed cumulus and stratocumulus, tendriled cirrus like cotton candy strands pulled from a paper cone, speckled altocumulus pebbling half the sky, thick-flanneled stratus soaking the spring day, contrails drawn by transatlantic airlines making puffy Xs across the sky, menacing thunderclouds, thousands of feet tall, lashing a sultry summer afternoon with rain and lightning.

You could while away many an afternoon and never not see something new.

You could take a thousand photographs and no two would be the same.

You could clean the house, trim the goat hooves, fold the laundry, do the bills.

Or you could lie down along the earth’s grassy spine and watch the clouds float by.

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This is my last photo in the series of 52. A new 52 Photos project is starting on Sunday, May 4. For more information, check out the 52 Photos Project blog.

52 Photos – Petals

First things first.

The snow has melted. The geese are honking their way northward. Last night M saw bats, and we heard the songs of foreign birds, traveling through, making joyful trilling melodies we’d never heard before in our little corner of Vermont. The river is riding high on its banks, and with today’s steady rain it might decide to creep over the ledge to see what it’s like to spread out over the fields. I haven’t heard a spring peeper yet, but the vernal ponds are thawed and shimmering. It’s only a matter of moments.

I hear tell of people in other places who’ve seen crocuses and other early bulbs; not just their green pointy fingers thrown up through the soil, but actual blooms, blossoms, petals.

Not here. Not yet.

(Thank goodness, by the way, for trucks and airplanes that transport roses with flame-tipped petals from southern hot houses to the the mud-bound north.)

But yesterday we brought the hibernating garden hose out of the basement, attached it to the the outdoor spigot, and used it to fill the goats’ water tank. If that’s not a sign of spring, I don’t know what is.

This long, lingering winter’s left me fairly brittle. Slow to thaw. But this week I’m starting to unclench just a little, to unfurl. I’m not ready to bloom yet, but I felt the warm sun on my head yesterday, and I felt a softening where the ice has held fast.

The baby apple and pear trees, which were up to their throats in snow just two weeks ago, are covered with brown buds, potential blossoms, but there’s no sign yet of their opening (I check every day). Fairly soon, though, everything will be bursting into spring and we’ll be mowing the lawn and slapping at mosquitoes.

For my birthday this year, M & H gave me a beehive. And 10,000 bees and their queen. We bring the bees home on Saturday. Listen up, buds! You’d better start blooming. We’ve got some pollen and nectar to gather!

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These photos and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.