This morning, between printing off copies of essays I need to edit for a/b:Auto/Biography Studies, which thanks to John Underwood will have a new website this week, and making myself a bowl of raisin bran (and trying to keep it from the cat), I hear a thud at the front door. Blue barks, then points at something on the stoop.
Yellow breasted, black billed, about four inches long. On its back, twitching. With the cats out.
It's a pine warbler. I pick it up, hold it for a while trying to find a place to set it so it won't get eaten while it shakes off its stupor. I lay it in the mulch under the rosemary bush. It blends in so well with the pine straw and chipped wood I can hardly see it. From the window I watch it as best as I can, given how the pattern of its feathers shifts it into and out of sight from moment to moment. Right now it's sitting up a little better, breathing more steadily, blinking and looking around. I think it's going to be okay.
When I heard it, I thought it was a ruby-throated hummingbird (this, by the way, is a decent link to birding blogs if you're into them). We have about half a dozen fighting over the feeders out there, and sometimes they're so intense they forget about everything, hit the windows, roll around like angry siblings on the walk. It's crazy. They're desperate, of course, trying to get fat enough to fly to Mexico in a month.
I heard a pileated woodpecker in the neighbor's dead slash pine while I was holding the warbler; also a hawk of some sort. The brown thrasher and the rest of the birds we get at the grain feeders were all huddled under the underbrush, I could see them waiting and watching, one eye on me, one eye on the sky with the hawk hung in it like a hank of black wool.
It might rain today. The air feels heavy and still, like something's about to happen.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Wow, I have a new forum. Thanks, Kate.
My dog hates the books I read. The grey dog, I mean. The red dog doesn't much care what I read. He isn't really a critic so much of books. He's more into who comes within a mile or so of the house. Mostly he hates these people.
I was reading Agate Nesaule's Woman in Amber, had gotten to the part where her mother had insisted they weren't going from the DP camp to Brazil (which essentially condemned Nesaule's father to digging ditches beside the gold-paved streets of America), when Aleksondra Hultquist called to see if we were still in Georgia and wanted to go to dinner. We were -- more on that in a second -- and did. I left the book on the table. We came home. Confetti. Ollie, the grey dog, is part whatever, part catahoula, all cuddly and sweet and absolutely ashamed of having shredded something about the Holocaust in particular, by a friend of a friend, in extra particular. He isn't to be blamed, honestly.
It must have been the texture of the paper.
(Chuck says hello.)
This morning I woke up worried about Ponya the elephant. She's at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, which is about to be hit, again, by a hurricane. She's the only elephant I've ever touched and she was okay with this, or at least got extra carrots or something because she behaved well and didn't step on me (or the other twelve people with hands on her flank at the time). I don't know that I would be okay with such a thing. Perhaps the carrots really help, or maybe she's secretly really cuddly, only so big that laps are impossible. So appreciates whatever she can get.
Hurricane Gustav is headed for NO again, and I can't really think about what's going to happen for very long. I went there a year ago this fall, to Long Beach to visit Countryside Roses (check out their pages on Hurricane Katrina), and was -- I don't even know what the word is -- something like stunned, shocked, impressed, horrified, something in that matrix -- by the way the place still looked. Like a disaster area, still, despite years of work by the residents and folks who came to help.
And by the obvious trauma the people there were still feeling. So I'm worried about Lisa and her friend Bob, who we met and who was wearing a shirt still stained with Katrina crud (which I discover is both the yuck and the respiratory problems it gives you). And of course the roses, the pets, the people we met there. A couple of weeks ago, we were worried about our own house in St. Pete and the path of Fay -- our renter had a mandatory evac notice, but all he got was a lot of rain. Sort of like the summer of 2004. We were there for the four hurricanes that passed over us, and in 2005 when Katrina and Ivan passed by us.
Which is all to say that Chuck and I were planning to go to FL for Labor Day, but I didn't get my promotion app done until mid-Friday, and then there's Gustav chugging in, with Hanna not far behind. So we'll get down there later, I imagine, if it's still there.
[Really we want to see Cameron, who owns Cameron Hair. If you're ever in St. Pete and can't wait to have your hair done, Cameron's the guy. After the fiasco at Indulge here in town, I'll make the 8 1/2 hour drive next time and all the times after that, too.]
[My mother is also in that area, too.]
I'm hoping I know how to post this, and can go back now to my low-tech life, reading Nancy Mairs' Remembering the Bonehouse -- I'm almost at the bottom of a stack of books I bought right after this year's IABA conference. I always make an enormous list of things that sound fascinating, but this year I actually went home and bought them. Haven't had but one disappointment: Nancy Reagan's My Turn, which just proved to me all over again how little I liked her OR her husband. She can't write at all (or hire a ghost writer who can, or maybe identify one who can, probably more likely) and she has the most horrifying ideas about life -- what hers means beyond catering to men and disliking her children until they agreed with her is seemingly beyond her. Can't remember who said I should read it because it would be interesting. That person was wrong.
These books are safely out of the way of Ollie, who's now curled up on the ottoman, asleep.
Interesting thing, blogs. I wonder how they keep from being boring, or if they are, to other people. I find Nick McRae's blog really interesting, and have read Kate's, of course, and a couple others --
How do you sign off? I guess like this.
I was reading Agate Nesaule's Woman in Amber, had gotten to the part where her mother had insisted they weren't going from the DP camp to Brazil (which essentially condemned Nesaule's father to digging ditches beside the gold-paved streets of America), when Aleksondra Hultquist called to see if we were still in Georgia and wanted to go to dinner. We were -- more on that in a second -- and did. I left the book on the table. We came home. Confetti. Ollie, the grey dog, is part whatever, part catahoula, all cuddly and sweet and absolutely ashamed of having shredded something about the Holocaust in particular, by a friend of a friend, in extra particular. He isn't to be blamed, honestly.
It must have been the texture of the paper.
(Chuck says hello.)
This morning I woke up worried about Ponya the elephant. She's at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, which is about to be hit, again, by a hurricane. She's the only elephant I've ever touched and she was okay with this, or at least got extra carrots or something because she behaved well and didn't step on me (or the other twelve people with hands on her flank at the time). I don't know that I would be okay with such a thing. Perhaps the carrots really help, or maybe she's secretly really cuddly, only so big that laps are impossible. So appreciates whatever she can get.
Hurricane Gustav is headed for NO again, and I can't really think about what's going to happen for very long. I went there a year ago this fall, to Long Beach to visit Countryside Roses (check out their pages on Hurricane Katrina), and was -- I don't even know what the word is -- something like stunned, shocked, impressed, horrified, something in that matrix -- by the way the place still looked. Like a disaster area, still, despite years of work by the residents and folks who came to help.
And by the obvious trauma the people there were still feeling. So I'm worried about Lisa and her friend Bob, who we met and who was wearing a shirt still stained with Katrina crud (which I discover is both the yuck and the respiratory problems it gives you). And of course the roses, the pets, the people we met there. A couple of weeks ago, we were worried about our own house in St. Pete and the path of Fay -- our renter had a mandatory evac notice, but all he got was a lot of rain. Sort of like the summer of 2004. We were there for the four hurricanes that passed over us, and in 2005 when Katrina and Ivan passed by us.
Which is all to say that Chuck and I were planning to go to FL for Labor Day, but I didn't get my promotion app done until mid-Friday, and then there's Gustav chugging in, with Hanna not far behind. So we'll get down there later, I imagine, if it's still there.
[Really we want to see Cameron, who owns Cameron Hair. If you're ever in St. Pete and can't wait to have your hair done, Cameron's the guy. After the fiasco at Indulge here in town, I'll make the 8 1/2 hour drive next time and all the times after that, too.]
[My mother is also in that area, too.]
I'm hoping I know how to post this, and can go back now to my low-tech life, reading Nancy Mairs' Remembering the Bonehouse -- I'm almost at the bottom of a stack of books I bought right after this year's IABA conference. I always make an enormous list of things that sound fascinating, but this year I actually went home and bought them. Haven't had but one disappointment: Nancy Reagan's My Turn, which just proved to me all over again how little I liked her OR her husband. She can't write at all (or hire a ghost writer who can, or maybe identify one who can, probably more likely) and she has the most horrifying ideas about life -- what hers means beyond catering to men and disliking her children until they agreed with her is seemingly beyond her. Can't remember who said I should read it because it would be interesting. That person was wrong.
These books are safely out of the way of Ollie, who's now curled up on the ottoman, asleep.
Interesting thing, blogs. I wonder how they keep from being boring, or if they are, to other people. I find Nick McRae's blog really interesting, and have read Kate's, of course, and a couple others --
How do you sign off? I guess like this.
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