210630 Butter-and-eggs

June 30

Butter-and-eggs is one of my favorite meadow flowers, their charming name and tiny white and yellow snap-dragon florets.They remind me of my mother. But then most wildflowers invoke her presence.

I have been unable to write since the 20th of June. Today I have been on the porch watching a rainstorm cross the valley. The hummingbird stopped to have some sips - he or she comes by a dozen times a day. I hear her humming, too loud for an insect, too musical, so I stop moving and let her feed. She is not afraid though I am six feet from her, but if I move or make a noise she will be off. There is at least a pair, perhaps a second pair. They don't have labels and I often can't even tell which sex it is - only once or twice have I seen its red throat. So I sit still and wonder what the mind of a hummingbird is like. What is she conscious of? What is she thinking?

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We can hear the church bell in Mansonville ring the hours if we are outside. 

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I feel mindless, perhaps as mindless as the hummingbird, though even trees must dream they are trees, and thirst and sleep and wake. My eyes are filled with the world around me so that there is no internal, the supreme human self-consciousness is reduced to the electric blips on the neuron pathways as insignificant to my awareness as the synapses in the mind of the hummingbird. My ears hear the birds and the wind and the rain, even the buzzing of flies and bees, so that I can't think. My skin feels the air, my feet the ground, All the fragrances of the flowers and wet earth and trees - I can smell them in the air - it is never the same from breath to breath, but it is clean, a pallet, and sometimes soft.

*****

This might be a cast-iron bull frog. He sits motionless on this log most days, a self-proclaimed guardian of the ridge pond. He is about four inches long.

Daisies, our wedding flower, amid some birdsfoot trefoil. My mother suggested daisies for our wedding table. Forty years later then, they are a roadside reminder of that happy day.

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We had an unexpected visitor on the box of brokens on the porch, when a young robin found this little resting spot. 

He made his way to the branch by the stump, where his mother found him - not that she had lost him, mind you! She brought him dinner over the next few hours, until by nightfall he was able to fly off to the nest.

The bluebirds seem to have gone away - taken their fledglings for survival training. Bluebirds often have two or more broods in a summer, so I am hoping they will come back to the birdhouse for a second family. The vultures are hunting in a wake of five or six over the mountain. The babies are fledged and being taught to hunt. Until now we usually only saw one at a time. Most of the year, one of the signature identifiers of vultures is that they hunt in larger groups, while hawks hunt in ones and twos. Other helpful identifiers are their steeper V shape while soaring (dihedral angle), their dark underside: most hawks are lighter on the underside, and their raggedy-ass wing tips, like fingers. If they are near enough you might glimpse their red head and see the two-toned black/grey of their wings.

Mumma Yaga