ENDURANCE

I looked out the kitchen window this afternoon and saw a blob on the lawn. Immediately I thought that a bird had met some awful fate. I went out to inspect and was relieved to see a tired looking pine cone. In the far corner of my backyard I have a pine tree that has probably been on the property since the house was first built in the late 1940s. The red bellied woodpecker loves it as do the squirrels. Every fall it drops a boatload of pine cones in the yard. I hate picking them up because they are sticky, but by Spring they seem to be gone. I was amazed that this one had survived not only the twenty inches of snow that had buried it, but the cats who seem to love batting the pine cones around.

WET

TOO MUCH TECH

As I was winding down tonight I looked at the kitchen peninsula and saw my blackberry on top of my laptop. Nearby was the digital camera and some lenses and of course the ubiquitous cup of coffee. Who needs the coffee... I'm wired enough or is it wi-fi enough?

TEAMWORK

SWEET GUM

As my Mom left me today she handed me this woody looking sphere and said, "Do you know what this is?" Puzzled I shook my head. "Sweet gum", she replied and continued, "Remember that post you did about sycamore trees (March 27), well you were wrong they were sweet gum trees". Mom told me she did some checking and actually found this sweet gum pod or seed ball to show me. She had been driving around with it for several months. I couldn't believe that she pursued this, but then if you know my Mom you know she is tenacious when it comes to education and learning (especially the New York Times Sunday crossword). I turned the pod over in my hands, touched the sharp prickly edges and marveled at how intricate it was. All dried it looked interesting and I liked the way the light hit it. I mused about how such a thorny, prickly thing could be from a sweet gum tree! Just another conundrum to think about.

SCRABBLE

I'm returning to my roots. I have rediscovered Scrabble. The past few Friday nights have been dinner with Momma, my cousin and some friends and then dessert with a game of Scrabble. Mom's a tough opponent, but then she always was a wordsmith, finishing the New York Times Sunday crossword before the day is out! There is something about taking random letters, working with them and creating meaningful order that I like. It's especially nice when you can place the order you created on a triple word score space, as I did tonight for 45 points! I managed to win tonight. Our Scrabble games are brain food and so much more.

BUSY AS

As I left home to head to work this morning I saw this big bumble bee busy working the buds of my azalea bush. Of course I thought of that hackneyed expression, "Busy as a bee". Then I got to thinking about Memorial Day weekend and how everyone was celebrating. Well, not everyone....I guess there are all kinds of busy in the world. Busy working, busy celebrating, just plain busy. Are we ever anything but busy these days? I think busy is the status quo now.

GEOMETRY

This rhododendron is in my front flower bed and I walk past it every day. It was here when I bought my house eight years ago and was certainly here for years prior to that. Today as I passed I noticed the gorgeous big flowers but what really caught my interest were the buds. I love the symmetry of them the alternating green and violet triangular shapes and the way they lend a real sense of depth to the photo. I guess I like the geometry of the image. Funny, I never liked geometry in school!

PRIMARY COLORS

I'm learning things about myself as I shoot pictures for this blog. I felt very uninspired today and flirted with the idea of abandoning this effort. Too much like work I told myself. No one even looks at it... what's the object of this exercise? The tulips on my coffee table caught my eye and I started shooting some pictures. I couldn't get close enough and resorted to the macro lens. I kept getting closer, trying to abstract the image into geometric shapes of primary colors. I remembered my senior year of college studying Picasso and his cubist period where he started to deconstruct images in his paintings. I couldn't warm up to his work then, but as I shot the tulips I thought I should revisit Picasso and his cubism. Undoubtedly my art history classes influenced me, but until today I didn't realize they influenced how I shoot. And why do I do this? I think it allows me to explore different ways of seeing and in this space I can take risks. It's a process. I love the primary colors of these tulips and I especially like the intersection of the leaf as a green triangle. But I think I should have gotten even closer to the tulips!

MYSTERIES

Often after a particularly tough day at work I retreat to the garden when I come home. It helps me to clear my head. I get lost in the successes and failures of things I have planted and marvel at nature's mysteries. From the time I bought my house I always had a cluster of grape hyacinth that I could see from my kitchen window. This year I can find only two or three of them. I have no idea what happened to them and have resorted to blaming it on last year's landscaper who didn't know the difference between a weed and a flower. He's gone (fired him last fall) and apparently the grape hyacinth are too. Curiously, grape hyacinth are actually not Hyacinths at all. They are members of the Lily family. Yet another mystery!

FACES

My grandmother loved pansies. I remember in early Spring my grandmother, my Mom and I would go to the nursery to buy pansies and then plant them on the family cemetery plot. My mother and grandmother would pick out the plants with great care, comparing them and talking about their faces. My Mom explained to me that like people, each pansy has a unique face. Of course my seven year old imagination was fascinated by this concept. Every Spring I still think about it. My trip to the nursery to pick out pansies is an annual rite of passage. Carefully I scrutinize their faces and think about the two generations before me that did this same thing. I think about family and tradition and the faces of the pansies seem to smile at me.

ANDROMEDA

When I moved into my house almost eight years ago the garden was overgrown and the landscaping, like the house was neglected and in need of attention. The house got my attention first and the garden is still a work in progress. I never really liked the andromeda shrub that is planted near some rhododendron in the front of the house. The bees seem to love it and I always give it a wide berth when I pass. Several years in a row I have pruned it so severely that it looks like nothing more than a stump. Will it come back in the Spring, I wonder. Each year it does. This year a landscaper looking at the property told me that the andromeda was quite old. He estimated it could have been planted more than fifty years ago. Immediately I felt guilty about those extreme pruning jobs. I'm thinking of a facelift, for the garden that is. The andromeda will be here next Spring too.