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Nature

Exquisite Creatures

If you enjoy perpetual whiplash between disgust and fascination, do I have the thing for you! That is, if you hurry – this is the last weekend of Christopher Marley’s Exquisite Creatures at OMSI, and then they are packed away in cartons, glass or metal containers, and shipped off.

You’ll meet a jarring abundance of dead animals, 1000s and 1000s of them across two full floors of the museum, with the amounts of applied embalming fluid alone making centuries of Egyptian pharaohs roll in their pyramids, green with envy.

The exhibition shows the corporeal remnants of insects, butterflies, chameleons, crabs, scorpions, shells, snakes, turtles, fish and birds – all found dead, it is repeatedly emphasized, not killed for the show. The point, though, is, they are mostly not displayed as single specimens, to introduce the public to the wonders of nature, as they would in a natural history museum, where the aurochs might elicit awe that cannot be had on the streets of NYC (or only be had by other sources…)

The corpses are displayed in patterns and arranged by color, carefully calibrated by Marley, a self-taught naturalist who was a school drop-out and men’s fashion model at various points in his life, but is now a true nature enthusiast who speaks from the heart about the interconnectedness of things and travels the world to find the materials for his designs.

And designs they are: spanning the spectrum from a likely advertisement for room freshener, to semblance of abstract aboriginal art.

And they are fascinating, as long as you can suppress thoughts about the source of the collage pieces. The eye part of me could not get enough of the colors on display, the variations of nature’s palette, the sheer beauty of evolution’s blueprints and the inventiveness of Marley’s kaleidoscopic creations. The brain part of me could not forgive that there is yet another way we exploit nature, by manipulating it into artificial constructs that speak to artificial design rather than an intended place in the world.

Accumulations of feathers and seashells seem innocuous enough. It gets a bit trickier with the bugs, although they look sufficiently like buttons you get way with ignoring where they once might have crawled.

The butterflies are familiar as cased objects, centuries of collectors, pins in hand, made sure of that.

The fish and turtles seem so plastic-like that you can avoid thinking about their origins.

It gets complicated with the 4-legged creatures

and for me, surprise, dear reader, with the birds. To see them used as token kaleidoscopic images feels sacrilegious.

I tried to think through what produced my reaction. People have always displayed nature with precision – I grew up, for example, with prints by Maria Sibylla Merian, one of my heroines, on the dining room wall, the 17th century naturalist and artist, who embarked on trips around the world to collect insect specimens for truly scientific purposes and rendered them beautiful. But these were engravings. People make land art with found natural materials, but these are inanimate, stones and wood for the most part. I have no problem with floats being covered with designs made out of dead flowers (other than the tastelessness of their arrangements, as a rule.)

It must be the sense that what was once animate, a living, creeping, crawling, slithering, hopping, swimming or fluttering subject, has become an object. The placement in complicated designs might invoke overall iridescent beauty, but it creates tokens, puzzle pieces, erasing a singular existence. And clearly the troubling effect on viewers gets linearly stronger the higher upward the evolutionary ladder we get. As a thought experiment try to envision that you’d place dead hamsters in geometrically intricate patterns. Dead Cats? Dead Sheep? It is no coincidence that mammals make no appearance in this show.

For every gaggle of kids surrounding me, squealing with delight about the wonders in front them, there was the one wailing in the corner,”I can’t look at this!” Empathetic 4th graders dragging their class mate to a display of flowers: “It’s safe here, it’s flowers! “Little did they know they’d just arrived at pitcher plants, insect-killing machines……

I left OMSI with a treasure trove of images that remind me of individual beauty of a creature – and a sense of renewed commitment to and respect for nature, not because of what I saw, but in opposition to it. Not a bad outcome for a museum visit!

Let’s now hear the fleas! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drzcj5LF7K4&feature=emb_logo

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Our Place when we need a break….

Our place when we need a break? Why, nature, of course. In my instance, after a week of extensive writing projects, it’s no further than my garden. Soaked, peaceful, waiting for spring.

The Hellebores:

The last of the Hawthorne berries, ignored by the squirrels who grow fat on our birdseeds…

The cedars, crying

The roses, sending out a first leaf

And my ornamental fish growing a moss beard with all the rain…

Feeling better, already.

Here are the last lines of a Thomas Hardy poem, Proud Songster. You’ll hear them in the song cycle by Finzi which will conclude this week.

“But only particles of grain, and earth, and air, and rain.”

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Urban Green Spaces

Add a third person to the list of those actually managing to make me reluctantly listen to podcasts – next to my Beloved and my son, I now owe some gratitude to Gordon Caron, a dear friend who yesterday sent a link to an NPR program, HUMANKIND.

The program features Mike Houck from the Urban Greenspaces Institute at Portland State University, who launched the Urban Naturalist program at the Audubon Society many years ago, and helped form the Metro Parks and Nature program.  He also serves on the City of Portland’s Planning and Sustainability Commission; The Intertwine Alliance board of directors; and The Nature of Cities board.

Houck’s central focus, other than acknowledging and preparing for climate change, concerns the integration of natural spaces into built environments, cities and the like. He feels strongly that we should not just preserve the pristine wild, a priority of so many other environmental organizations, but ensure immediate encounters with nature on a daily basis. Providing easy access, in other words, to nature where people live, whether it is San Francisco, LA, Chicago or Portland, every day, not just on vacation. “How can a child care for the survival of the condor, if s/he has never known a wren,” is something he cites in the conversation with Humankind’s broadcaster, Freudberg.

He urges that we need to protect urban green spaces and (re)build them, including metropolitan wildlife preserves. It will make people engage in nature, come to love and thus protect it, reap health benefits and even financial advantages, since property close to natural areas are increasing in value. Indirectly that protects rural and more pristine areas as well, because people will reside in livable cities and not expand beyond the urban growth boundary, parceling up the country side (and using the car to drive to work….)

One of the urban nature preserves he is keen on is Oaks Bottom, my regular Tuesday haunt as readers of this blog (particularly those who I cherish as my coffeecup coven) are well aware of. (iPhone photographs are from yesterday! Original introduction here.) The 160 acre wetland was filled with rubble from building the freeway and once used as a landfill.

Black cottonwood and ash forest only partially obstruct the view to the downtown skyline. Yesterday I saw a bald eagle (there is a pair nesting close by)

a barred owl (!)

and once again the little kingfisher from last week, although too far away to get in view with the phone in one hand, an impatient leashed pointer on the other…

S/he is on top of the stick jutting out on top from the pile.

In the podcast you hear Houck’s voice get all excited when he reports, live, all the kinds of critters he is seeing. Map that marveling onto my face, and you got me pinned Tuesday mornings. The podcast is worth a listen.

So is today’s music: Schumann’s Wald Szenen (Forest Scenes.) I chose not the perennial version by Richter, but a faster one by Kadouch. If you ignore his theatrics, it’s really a lovely interpretation. Just close your eyes.

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Staying Put

Having looked at multiple aspects of migration (at least within the animal kingdom) I want to close out the week with a contemplation of the value of staying home. Not for the reasons that immediately come to mind: “Hey, curb your carbon foot print, no longer fly or drive so much, built your own backyard farm so you are are independent from the vicissitudes of national ecological decisions, etc.

I believe that is the California Towhee, but below I am certain its our very own here in OR

No, I’d like to explore the philosophical approach embraced by the bioregional movements, these days prominently represented by regions like Cascadia (our very own backyard) and the Ozarks, to name just a few and early on developed by Peter Berg who died 9 years ago.

Here are a few key terms to understanding the concept: bioregionality concerns itself with both the way how a) nature differs in different areas (and thus different geographical regions need differential treatment) and b) how a mindful ecosocial movement would approach the nature in its region finding ways to maximize all that is good for region and people at once, even if it means intense adjustments to the way things used to be done.

Mocking Bird

Bioregions are defined by watersheds, natural communities, places that are associated with a particular climate, seasons, aspects of soil, and types of native plants and animals. The boundaries are often defined by the people who live in these regions, and their ways to live sustainable and harmoniously within these given environments. Nature and culture, then, are interlaced parts of a given bioregion. People do count as much as the rest of the biological and geological package. Details for the husbandry of such an entity – a bioregion – can be found here. Resource management, land planning, conservation biology, social and political structuring towards ethical approaches to nature are part and parcel of the bioregionalism movement.

The Night Heron

Importantly, and this brings us back to where we started this week when arguing that we need to actually learn from and listen to nature herself, the bioregionalism movement urges us to familiarize ourselves with the region we live in: feel its time and place, and become if not intimate with then at least knowledgeable about the fauna and flora of your environs. This knowledge will be a good stepping stone to decide how you as an individual should live in this region and what communal, social, economical and political structures would be of the best interest of the region.

Acorn Woodpecker

Here is a fabulous example of writer and activist, Jenny Odell, who teaches at Stanford, trying to get to know her particular region through listening, mindfully, to the typical birds she encounters. If you open the link below and click on each of the 5 bird names you get multiple sound recordings of their songs.

Sound: Birdsong
Finch in full mating colors

I have photographed some of the bird she mentioned, although they are likely the Oregon counterparts to her California species. Will throw some other in for good measure since I listen to them on a daily basis, except when the herons croak, then I cover my ears….

This kingfisher was a rare encounter 3 days ago – they never sit still to be photographed….

Here is music in honor of our own region’s little ruler. The 2 movements couldn’t be more different.

(PS There is also a unconvincing sonnet by this name (by Gerald Manley Hopkins) and an off- Broadway play that had good reviews about a Nazi, sentenced to life without parole in a Vatican prison, discussing free will, life and death with a priest before being smuggled to freedom. I’ll skip that…..)

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Migration (3)

Happy sloths. Happy storks. Happy Cows. Unhappy whales. At least some of them. (And yes, you only get the jokes if you regularly read the blog when it resorts to the to be continued mode….)

This week was devoted to looking more closely at nature and in particular at migration. Whales, of course, are among the most familiar species doing an annual trek, and we would be remiss not to mention some of the scientific findings around their existence. (I wrote a bit about them last year here.)

So why describe them as unhappy? Well, several of their kind are severely endangered, and not just because the whale oil industry of yore pursued them to the brink of extinction.

Take right wales, for example, who once roamed the Atlantic and whose numbers are dwindling. In the last 10 years the number of calves born to them have dropped tremendously. And when a calf is born it rests for some 5 months with the mother at the ocean’s surface – completely at risk to be stricken by shipping vessels, or caught in fishing gear. Mariners cannot detect them with listening devices, to avoid collisions, because the instinctual behavior is NOT to make sounds, to avoid natural predators. Between declining fertility and rising accident mortality, they are at risk of extinction. Only 400-500 of them remain in the Atlantic and fewer than 100 in the Pacific.

Sei whales? Endangered. Blue whales? Endangered. Sperm and fin whales? Vulnerable. Any tidbits that can distract us from getting too depressed by these facts? The tongue of a blue whale alone is equivalent to the weight of an elephant! They migrate from the polar and subarctic regions in summer to the tropical and subtropical waters in winter, some of them are over 150 years old – which means they actually were alive during commercial whaling times and might remember being hunted by whalers. Autopsies on dead sperm whales revealed up to 65 pounds of plastic in their stomachs, leading to blockage and causing lethal peritonitis. Ok, not helping with the depression, is it.

I can do better. Humpback whales are thriving after coming close to extinction! Scientists stress the role of proper management for the recovery (details here) but also warn that the food for which whales and so many other marine animals compete, namely Krill, is strongly affected by global warming, getting increasingly scarce. If more whales feed on it, there’s less to go around for the ones lower in the food chain….

Ok, I give up. All these facts are part of why I currently have turned to working on an art series that uses (partial) 17th century dutch paintings of traditional whaling expeditions, combined with my photographs of contemporary Northwest landscapes and birds, as an example of the consequences of ruthless environmental exploitation to both nature and humankind. Today’s images are the latest examples in that endeavor, I had, after all, promised some art as well.

And here is a tone poem by Alan Hovhaness performed by the Seattle symphony.

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Migration (2)

Yesterday I introduced the happy sloths of Panama. Today, let’s turn to happy cows. Doing whatever cows do in the Bavarian country side, they were unperturbed when a flock of large, strange white birds descended, alit on their backs and began nit-picking bovine fleece. Maybe there is something stronger than alkaloid compounds in the Bavarian water. In any case, it was enough of a strange sight that a young birder-in-training rushed to the relevant experts trying to find out what on earth had just happened.

It was a flock of unfamiliar cattle egrets who had made a wrong turn during their migration.

Some decades later, our observant youngster Martin Wikelski has become the director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany, after teaching stints that included years at Princeton. He is still interested in birds, and now in general migration patterns as indicators of disease spread, disaster detection, and global change. He is spearheading ICARUS, (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) a program connected to the International Space Station as a tracking site for interacting animal migrations, installed last summer. (Equally impressive, in my book, is of course the fact that this guy lists adventurer in first place on his CV, scientific grandeur notwithstanding.)

He stuck with birds, but cows have not disappeared either. They are currently part of a research program that has fitted sensor-studded radio transmitters in quake-prone regions around the world to various birds and mammals, trying to pick up earthquake warnings from changes in the animals behavior and physiology (a controversial project, one might add, with geologists not convinced that animal behavior changes around the timing of an earth quake. But that will be obviously explored now.)

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What do we know about migration, though? Take one short minute and check out this video, which shows you the flow of movement across the globe. It is astounding.

We know that they move and where they move, at least for some of the species. We do not quite understand why they move such huge distances and, when finding a place that is perfectly suited, regularly leave it nonetheless to make the long trek back home. Home being not just a general area, but a specific tree in a specific forest, a distinct chimney, church tower or other nesting sites. Sometimes the specificity is encoded across generations, so that some butterflies return to exact places where their great-grand parents came from, not more immediate forbears.

We know that migration serves not just the migratory animal populations, but others along their routes, who feed on the carcasses of those who didn’t make it, or live on lands fertilized by the droppings, or cleared of pests, insects that are devoured by the birds in flight (swallows, or more precisely, swifts, fly for six months (!) non-stop, and are eating insects en route and apparently sleeping while flying as well…)

We cannot yet explain why migration happens to such far away places as the Amazon, when Ft. Lauderdale is just around the corner, equally warm and comfy, say… and why distances increased across the millennia. And in particular we have not yet figured out why on average each species follows its particular migratory routes, but then there are always outliers, who do not comform.

Leave it to our intrepid ecologist and adventurer to follow exactly these non-conforming individuals, trying to figure out if it was disease that stopped them, or external forces or something else altogether. Pursuing a stork he had named Hansi, he jets to Turkey, awaits once-daily radio transmissions to narrow the distance to the subject, and eventually finds Hansi perfectly happy and healthy gorging on frogs in some field near the Syrian border.

The hypothesis is that natural selection programs some section of the progeny to wander farther afield. That innovative individual will be important for the species to thrive, to survive when aggregate flows are threatened by disaster, by pathogens, or by obstacles put in their way by human activities. (This reminds me of a nasty fight going on between two factions of German environmentalists right now. Some want to erect wind turbines to curb carbon emissions, others fight against them to protect wetlands and birds. The laughing third is of course the oil and coal industry.)

We’ll see what the research data will reveal. In the meantime I decided to pull some hang-gliding photographs from the archives in Wikelski’s honor. He reports that he has become an avid hang glider in order to explore how it must feel to be a bird (his words.) Well, he won’t be up there for 6 months at a time…… and I also hope he is never the parent of a kid who does this – cost me many an anxious moment in my lifetime. Then again, it also took me on some pretty spectacular hikes, like the one shown here at Silverstar Mt.,WA.


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Migration

There’s always Panama. If we get too overwhelmed by the insanity of the contemporary world we could migrate to some island near Panama joining a troupe of exceedingly happy, permanently stoned sloths. You read that right: the moss there, and the water infused by the moss, has an alkaloid- based chemical composition that is also found in Valium…. much appreciated by an already slow-moving species.

Canada Geese, who no longer migrate

I picked up this comforting tidbit of information from a radio show that taught me a lot about migration, something I’ve been again wondering about last week when I found myself amongst hundreds of visiting white geese, Canada geese and sandhill cranes during my walks. Below is the condensed version of what I learned.

Sandhill Cranes

Questions like why does migration happen in general, and where do these birds come from or where do they go, how do they know the travel routes and/or final destinations, have been asked for 1000s of years. We have now answers for some of the questions, and are still surprisingly clueless about others.

White Geese

Aristoteles – is there any subject he didn’t tackle, ever? – suggested three possibilities to explain the disappearance of birds during the Greek winter months. One was the speculation that they traveled to other places, one was the suggestion that they might hibernate (behavior that people had observed in bats around Athens) and the third was transmutation. Wish that were true – let’s just all transmute into happier forms when we are bored with our worm pecking, grub searching existence…. let’s become sloths!

The migration hypothesis was elevated in the 17th century with the (re)invention of the telescope by Hans Lippershey in the early 1600s. (He applied for a patent (!) thus outsmarting a local competitor who claimed it was his design – but that is a mystery story for another day.) Peering into the sky and seeing all those lunar hills and craters suggested perfectly sensible travel plans of birds: they go to the moon! It took until 1822 to dislodge this human projection of our own dream, when some hunting Count von So and So returned with his kill from the heaths of Northern Germany: a stork. A stork with a spear embedded in his neck, that had not prevented him from traveling North. A weapon that was, according to the consulted German luminaries in the university ethnology departments, of African origins. (You can read more about the “Pfeilstorch” here.)

Care to try flying with that thing in you for 2000 miles? At least you’re not a tern – they have a round trip of 60 000 miles!

Across the next years about 25 individual birds were collected that had somehow managed to migrate from one continent to the other with a piece of ebony poking through their necks… Mystery solved – birds migrated South. Scientific insight gained beyond the migration destination: some form of marking allows us to identify the birds and tracking their routes. Banding was born. Nowadays it comes in more sophisticated forms of transmitters and receivers. And it does not just apply to the field of ornithology, but people research the migration patterns of everything, from wildebeests, caribous, whales, to turtles and butterflies, to name a few.

More on the specifics of these patterns tomorrow. They do matter, beyond feeding into the passions of your friendly bird photographer, for our understanding of nature as a system, as it turns out.

And here is a gem sent by a friend.

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Choices, Choices…

Happy New Year to one and all. And what should it be, dear reader, the first weekly topic of 2020? What is the appropriate choice for a year looming in front of us like an iceberg, with the distinct options of either collision or rapid melting, not sure which one would be worse?

Should it be art? Politics? Literature? Nature? A snippet of them all, in combination? I’ll see what I can do.

What I can easily do is recommend a writer, Barry Lopez, who does it to perfection, creating that amalgam of politics and nature in his most recent book Horizon. Others agree:  It’s a beautiful, sorrowful autobiographical epic that feels like a final reckoning of sorts: with the difficulty of living a moral life today, with our estrangement from nature, and with the spectacular mess we’ve made of things. There’s not an iota of righteousness or judgment, but instead, abundant reminders of human possibility in desperate times. (You can find the whole conversation between John O’Connor, a journalism professor at BU and Lopez here.)

Lopez has excelled at both fiction and non-fiction writing that concerns the interface between nature and the more domesticated world, with his two early non-fiction works probably known best, Of Wolves and Men (1978) and Arctic Dreams (1986)—the latter a winner of the National Book Award. His writing is valuable for both the explanations he offers as to how we got to where we are, but also for the suggestions, both practical and political, of how we might handle what is in front of us – (which is why I was thinking of him when facing the calendar page with its fresh round numbers…)

I have been using the week between the years, my time “off,” for extended walks in the woods, all around Portland, in contrast to Lopez’ extensive travels to the less explored corners of the earth, but I think the conclusions are the same, no matter where you are: to connect to nature you need to stop controlling it, you need to stop talking and start to listen, start shifting the focus of your attention. This is one of the reasons why I photograph such a variety of things on my walks – not “just” the birds, but the trees, the plants, the vistas, the rivers, with widely distributed attention.

Found this garbage receptacle with sticker at the entrance to Forst Park on Firelane 1

Connecting to nature, to understand what is at stake as well as what can heal, is one of the greatest demands of our time. We might think we are far enough away from the fiery catastrophes unfolding in Australia, or the traumatic floods engulfing Indonesia, but the planet is connected. What we do matters, even in minute ways.

And no, this is not Cassandra Heuer speaking, this is a determined, energized and hopeful citizen of 2020, looking forward to summoning all in solidarity with the goal of protecting what needs protecting. If you don’t have the time to tackle the 500+ pages, here is a lovely comprehensive review of Horizon ending with these words:

Horizon is long, challenging and symphonic. Its patterns only disclose themselves over the course of a full, slow reading. Rhythms rise and surge across 500 pages; recursions and echoes start to weave. This is a book to which one must learn to listen. If one does, then – to borrow phrases from Lopez – “it arrives as a cantus, tying the faraway place to the thing living deep inside us”. He has given us a grave, sorrowful, beautiful book, 35 years in the writing but still speaking to the present moment: “No one can now miss the alarm in the air.”

And talking about something symphonic, here is Dvorak to guide us to a new year, making a new world.

Lopez lives along the McKenzie river in Oregon’s Mt. Hood State Forest. Photographs are from that forest photographed during bygone trips.

And this is me in my rain pants in the new year:” Stay intrepid!” is my resolution.

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Respite

Need respite from too much food, too much company, too many balls in the air, from recycling gift wrapping paper, never mind the ongoing harangues over social justice issues? Do I have the thing for you!

On this 5th night of Hanukah my present to all is a pretty remarkable audio work based on ultrasound and echolocation used by bats, dolphins and other creatures who operate beyond the range of human hearing – ‘seeing’ with sound, or perhaps ‘hearing’ objects. Added to that are “real” sounds, those that we can hear without them being stretched in time to be made audible.

“The mix for the piece is based on ultrasound, hydrophone recordings below the water and also of echolocation sound within audible range. The recordings were made in various locations in Central Park and East River in New York, USA, a forest outside Kaliningrad in Russia, Regents Park in London, UK, and various locations in Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The ultrasound is time-stretched to bring it into a frequency range audible for human beings. Recordings were made on a Pettersson Ultrasound Detector D1000X, Reson 4032 and DPA 8011 hydrophones and 4060 dpa microphones onto a Sound Devices 477T hard disk recorder.”

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I started to listen to Jana Winderen at the beginning of December, when I came across the article attached below. The Norwegian scientist turned artist makes field recordings and then creates audio collages in her sound studio. When she at times composes immersive installations for specific places, like the Wuzhen Contemporary Art Exhibition in China, the Thailand Biennial, Oslo’s Kunstnernes Hus, and Art Basel, she checks out the acoustics, temperature, and air quality of the hosting location, talks to local technicians, and gets a feel for the architecture of the space, all of which gets integrated into the compositions.

Creating Soundscapes From the Whispering, Bubbling, and Roaring Earth

Sitting and listening in a quiet place, uninterrupted, preferably with head phones, these compositions invariable generate a sense of peace and inner quietude that those of us who are meditation-challenged can otherwise only dream of. Your music for today.

And here are words capturing the sounds that the earth makes, as well.

Anchorage

By Joy Harjo

 for Audre Lorde

This city is made of stone, of blood, and fish.
There are Chugatch Mountains to the east
and whale and seal to the west.
It hasn’t always been this way, because glaciers
who are ice ghosts create oceans, carve earth
and shape this city here, by the sound.
They swim backwards in time.

Once a storm of boiling earth cracked open
the streets, threw open the town.
It’s quiet now, but underneath the concrete
is the cooking earth,
                                 and above that, air
which is another ocean, where spirits we can’t see
are dancing                joking                   getting full
on roasted caribou, and the praying
goes on, extends out.

Nora and I go walking down 4th Avenue
and know it is all happening.
On a park bench we see someone’s Athabascan
grandmother, folded up, smelling like 200 years
of blood and piss, her eyes closed against some
unimagined darkness, where she is buried in an ache
in which nothing makes
                                       sense.

We keep on breathing, walking, but softer now,
the clouds whirling in the air above us.
What can we say that would make us understand
better than we do already?
Except to speak of her home and claim her
as our own history, and know that our dreams
don’t end here, two blocks away from the ocean
where our hearts still batter away at the muddy shore.

And I think of the 6th Avenue jail, of mostly Native
and Black men, where Henry told about being shot at
eight times outside a liquor store in L.A., but when
the car sped away he was surprised he was alive,
no bullet holes, man, and eight cartridges strewn
on the sidewalk
                        all around him.

Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it,
but also the truth. Because who would believe
the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival
those who were never meant
                                                to survive?

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No Turkey to be seen

I went on a turkey hunt yesterday, under a dark sky, with rain steadily falling, nature quietly preparing for the impending storm. Did I find any? Of course not.

I did find solace – the grey above had almost a greenish tinge which in turn enhanced the reds of the sprigs and branches of the shrubbery stripped of leaves. The colors were harmonious rather than melancholy, and the rain almost cheerful in its relentless drip.

Bald eagles were crossing the river, alighting eventually on some boulders in the middle of the stream, usually covered by water at this time of year. Not after this dry summer.

Ducks were cruising, up and down the rivulets running through the marsh. I heard red-winged black birds sing; that, too, rather late this year.

True thankfulness on this walk, on many walks, on almost every occasion of this vibrant life of mine. Thankful for my family, my friends, my readership, slowly growing and making me feel connected.

I’m signing off for the rest of the week, for some needed rest and recuperation. Wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving! With music to lift heart and spirits (while bellies sag from all the food – I assume the missing turkeys can be found in your various kitchens…)

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