At least getting one in this year

It’s a little wild out there today, but only in the best way.  Leaves are everywhere and color abounds.  Some people, mostly kids, I suppose, who think the trees wave their leaves and make the wind.  What a delightful thought, the trees getting together to toss the air along, running it and then they all stop together.  What wonderful harmonies they make with each other.  

Clouds scudding (no other word will do) across the sky from southwest up above the house and gone to the north east and the trees will not let the air rest as it runs into houses and hedges and over the top of my canyon where the air is resting before joining the rest.

Rain will arrive today but the foreplay of wind and leaves, murmurs at every point make it welcome when it comes, but for now, we shall all dance together.

“As dry leaves before the wild hurricane fly, when they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky.”

The wild gusts combing the leaves from the trees, where just yesterday I’d spent a quieter day employing rake and mower to gather the first flush of leaf fall, the yellowed tulip tree leaves starting first.  I knew I was providing a fresh canvas to paint all about the tree with yellow shapes, of different hues.  Leaving a new coat of many colors over the land.

Wild indeed today, the air is temperate enough to caress rather than pierce, the world is more alert, the leaves spread the news, change is coming, the world whirls into November with laughter today, playful, coaxing.  A special day, when we came in I had to give the dog a bone in apology.

Morning Springs Misty

It’s a soft day here in Oregon, and the clouds have spent the day slowly descending from just above the trees to now, almost to the ground. The trees on the far canyon wall are grayed as though in the far distance. I have spent many hours outside over the past month, grubbing out blackberry bushes and lots of the rocks carefully and partially buried by the previous owner to line both sides of the circular driveway all the way around the house. Wherever drive and lawn meet there used to be fringe where grass and other green stuff grew between the rocks. Now I’m planting bulbs, albeit a bit late, in all those holes the rocks left

These are about half of them, now what do I do with them? Eventually they are planned to go down to the creek to make a kind of pier, maybe.

Meanwhile I will be able to mow across the edges once the spring bulbs go by.

Cave paintings at the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters in Madhya Pradesh in India.

Cave paintings at the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters in Madhya Pradesh in India.

By Joshua Sokol Feb. 5, 2021 in the NY Times

This phrase so struck me,
“Over time, art styles shifted. Human figures donned clothes. Horses and elephants sprouted riders. Wars danced across sandstone faces. Today, many of the cave walls are now palimpsests, with medieval warriors covering Chalcolithic art on top of even older Mesolithic drawings.”

This is the recorded history of the changes wrought by major shifts in human history, does the record show us becoming clothed? Or perhaps the ability to depict a clothed human. But most amazing is what seems to me to be the indisputable record of domestication directly recorded unmistakably by the folk who were there.

I found myself, one time, in my Poke Boat against the shore next to one of the remaining oyster shell middens in Maine. I picked up an oyster shell and felt guilty and was flooded with awe, the last time this shell had been touched by a human, and it was unmistakably a shell that had last been touched by humans one to two thousand years ago. The river banks there were lined with tall mounds of oyster shells left from generations of locals who shucked each and every one. They shucked ’em out, as the sad truth goes, we are recently bringing back oysters to the area. The mounds were so vast, that they were mined for the calcium content for chicken feed in the 1880s until most were gone.

https://www.maine.gov/cgi-bin/online/doc/parksearch/index.pl?search_radio=1&state_park=&historic_site=80&public_reserved_land=&shared_use_trails=&town=&distance=&submit=Go+%BB