The Silent, Beautiful

“Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones–inkberry, lamb’s quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones–rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion.”  ― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays 

Salvia and the web of L.Venusta

The pollinator garden that we started when we moved here is a kingdom of swoon.  The hummingbirds join me as I sip my morning latte.  The Cerulean Warbler is the star singer in the morning amongst a chorus of Chickadee, Bluebirds, Crow, Goldfinch, Robin and Cardinal.  Sometimes the damselflies visit, and that is always enchanting.

In the forest beside the lake, the Wood Thrush is my muse, while the hawk cries overhead and somewhere a Red Bellied Woodpecker.  It's best in the early evening when the frogs sing along too.

Something or other attacked my peas, and I don't think they will make it.  The rest of the garden, however, is hardy as hell.  I see what I can do differently and better, and made notes for next year.

Somewhere in there is Anise Hyssop, Mountain Mint and more...

Lavender, Goldenrod, and various Coreopsis / Tickseed

Pink Evening Primrose

Nasturtium

Delphinium

Echinacea

Scarlet Bee Balm

PowWow White Coneflower

Swamp Milkweed

Butterfly Weed

Datura: Moonflower from Native Plant Festival 2019

Mine and His: Father's Day

Robert Cox 1959-2019

Another hurdle.  The first Father's Day without his father.  He said that he didn't want to think about it because it's too depressing.  I agree.  He wanted to get ice cream at the drive thru, so that's what we did. 

Everyone once in a while he tells me he's sorry because now he understands how painful it must have been for me when my father died.  He was only 49.  He had a successful bypass surgery and was on his way home to his celebration.  He died on the way home.  I still can't wrap my head around it. 

I can't wrap my head around any of this. 

Lenny Cook 1939 - 1988

Late Fragment

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? 

 I did. 

 And what did you want? 

 To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.” 

 ― Raymond Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall

It was a hard day.  He would have been 61 years old on Saturday.  Almost every year he would request Cherry Cobbler so that is what I would make.  S wanted me to continue to make it every year.  He also liked to go out to dinner on his birthday and since we couldn't do that due to pandemic we decided to get takeout.  We thought long and hard about what his father would have chosen, and we felt 100% confident that, in solidarity with BLM, he would want Jamaican Food to support black business owners.  SO, we ordered vegetarian plates from Island Delights in Winchester.



I had drive to WV yesterday for finger printing for a potential temp job.  The weather was beautiful so we decided we would take the yaks on the lake that evening.  While S fished, I explored the coves along the peninsula trying to find the source of the heavenly sweet scent in the air.  I didn't find it, but I did find honeysuckle and wild mint.

As the sun was setting we paddled back to shore.  We ate cobbler and called it dinner.

*A silly thing about the cobbler:  Every year I seemed to miss a pit and R was always the one to find it which S thought was wildly funny and deemed that whoever got a pit in their cobbler had good luck for the year.   This year, S helped by pitting the cherries for me.  We each got 2 pits in our cobbler.  He had such a laugh over it.