don't turn anything on

I heard that whispered on my way up from the garden this evening. A perfect hazy evening with glimpses of afternoon sun breaking through a streak of gray days.

We had finally got rain, from Fay, and it broke the trend leaning toward what was about to be

the driest august on record since 1929.

The build up to the rain was wonderful, a few days of balmy ocean breezes and darkly overcast clouds, swaying the trees gently and making the last summer greens darker and smelling of the beach hundreds of miles away. The rain was even more wonderful, filling back up the shrinking pond and dried up creeks and causing the frogs to go crazy.

The weather phenomena is past now, and it feels like a standard humid august evening, the crickets loud and constant, but not so loud that I didn't hear the whisper...don't turn anything on.

 

 

I assumed that meant, don't turn on the market report on public radio, or the convention on public television, or some evening blues on pandora, but go into the house quietly with the lights off and listen to the crickets and the night sounds. Smell the corn tassle fading and the kernels filling from the rain, smell the rising sour of the tomatoes that rotted from lack of water and are now plopping to the late summer ground. F

eel the humidity cool towards fall and start planning for firewood and hay while sitting in the dark.

when a tree falls in the forest....let there be light

I was coming down off the ridge by way of cane hollow the other day. I had gone on a "head clearing power walk / fence check" .

 

Mission accomplished, my mind was refreshed and calmed by the healthy green-ness of the younger trees and the signs of a good hickory nut crop coming on.

But somehow, sometimes, when you head back home in a hurry to get back to work, you do the same thing in the woods that you might do on the interstate. Your mind gets so caught up in planning for work that you bring yourself up with a start and say to yourself "my god! I have been driving mindless and blind for the last 10 minutes!

 

This gaping hole of bright sunlight in a familiar and formerly dark stretch of wooded hillside brought me back to the moment with an abrupt start.

 

The large and otherwise healthy looking oak laying on its side had not been there long enough to wilt its leaves, and its shattered trunk appeared without disease or hollowness, so what crashed it to the forest floor? We have not had any storms, wind or lightening in recent weeks. Perhaps it was suicide.

Whatever the cause, it has fallen across a major deer trail and also blocked my northern route back from the spring...guess I will wait for the deer to re-route and see if there transportation engineering design matches mine. Will also watch to see if the sunlight brings black raspberries or wood goldenrod to fill in the opening

tattered and torn

I am experimenting with embedding full screen slideshows...you have to click on the little full screen icon to start it...I got this code from bloggertemplates picasa web album
the problem is, when you close the slideshow, it takes you to my picasa album, not back to this blog...hmmm, maybe i have done something wrong?

cantaloupe leaves harvesting rainwater

I think I will start a new category entitled "things I never noticed before. or if I did, I forgot"

 

 

 

Of his senility, my Daddy has sometimes remarked that the beauty of having no memory is that every discovery is new, and a fresh surprise all over again.
hmmmph, some trade-off.

Anyway, I knew that plant leaves collect dew, which can sustain them in times of drought, I just never saw them collect it so tidily as on these cantaloupe leaves.
A few minutes after this early morning photo, the sun warmed the hollow enough to send the droplets sliding down their little river-shaped veins, and into the channel down the center of the petiole, straight to the ground below.
I ran around the garden investigating, do the pumpkins do this? No. Not in this fashion, the dew was spread in droplets over the surface of the pumpkin leaves, as well as the tomato, potato, pepper and bean leaves. Guess they have other tricks, or the microclimate conditions where just not exactly the same, but only the cantaloupe leaves wore necklaces of dew.

Why I quit posting in this blog, and why I might start back

Because a mean customer scolded me severely for posting in my blog, instead of answering her email, which I never received, because she used a bad email address.
I take things to heart, especially scolding.
I had to completely rethink the egoic relationship with writing and the energy it takes, and why I even bother to write when I don't say anything important and my family,the farm and my business need so much of me, my skills and my time.
That was months ago, I am over it now(sort of) but in the meantime, other family stuff has happened to slurp up even more of my time and it is harvest season...but here I am writing...because there are things that happen in the holler for which I want to say out loud..."well, I do declare! did you see that!? isn't the earth an amazing organism?"