Effie napping next to my chair while I email my friend

Effie is probably soaking up my thoughts as she reads my mind in her sleep; or, more likely, she’s bored and wants to try my computer as a napping place (I’m using my phone to email a friend). She does have an engaging way of sleeping.

A tad more snow

Earlier this morning before the sun had finished rising over the hills, the scene invoked Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn.” Still pretty, isn’t it?

Golden Thanksgiving Morning

Happy Thanksgiving! We are thankful for the beauty God has given us. The sunlight’s gleaming gold crested the fields and basalt hills only briefly. Clouds recaptured the hills immediately after I took the photo.

Westerly greetings

These sunflowers beam their cheery golden brightness into a west-facing window.

Anticipating a sunflower

For the several years my husband has planted sunflower seeds in the spring, they have come up tall and strong by the onset of summer in all their Sunflower Yellow glory. Ours are now forming flowers in their still-green stage. Their stalks are straight, tall, strong, and prickly.

I was trying to recall who wrote a poem with a refrain, “And I am waiting for the rebirth of wonder,” and came up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in whose poetry I lost interest while I was still in high school. I Googled the quote anyway, and it seems lots of people have used it, and it wasn’t expressly clear whether Ferlinghetti was the first.

Whoever wrote this line, it enters my mind when I await the bloom of sunflowers, and other wondrous and beautiful bounties with which our Creator blesses us, for nothing we have done.

A sunflower begins its complex process of blooming: it will undergo   metamorphoses from verdant to gold, and prickles to petals.
“I am waiting for the rebirth of wonder.”

Another fitting line: “Death is the mother of beauty.” (from Wallace Stevens’s poem, Sunday Morning).

Diversity in lilac

These boughs are all on one bush. I’ve never seen another multi-color lilac, but there must be others; most categories in nature manifest the delightful trait of color diversity. Our other lilac bushes represent all the colors this tree has, but each bush has just one color bloom.

Springtime, and trout warm to our invitations

The trout are not golden, of course; nor is the stainless steel sink. Evidently the flash had a transitory misapprehension episode.

Warmer weather (in the 50s), and daylight lasting til nearly 7:30, have replaced our short, cold days. This week my husband and I went fishing at the nearby pond Tuesday and Thursday after dinner. Tuesday, Vic caught two leaping rainbows, each about 10 inches, in less than an hour as dusk was approaching. Thursday, I caught two exuberant 10-inch trout in the same amount of time.

We feel honored that these beautiful fish, a bountiful boon from the Creator of fish and man, would come home with us.

We Have Fish!

Yes! Four respectable-size trout came home with us from the pond this evening. I caught three, 10-1/2″, 10″, and 9-1/2″. My husband caught a 10-1/2 incher. The evening was warm, even with an intermittent stiff wind. Fish were active all over the pond. I had many strikes at my lure, but only three hung on for the ride. We felt very blessed and thankful for the four who secured themselves for their worthy and valued destiny. They are beautiful representatives of Creation.

My husband will can our catch, and he is very excited to have trout again.

 

A snowy day’s considerations and frustrations

Very large flakes of dense, gushy, large, wet snow are falling. The falling snow provides a refreshing sight, enabling me to wish we could move to the Galapagos Islands, so that I might become a curator of tortoises, and I could quit reading the news.

As always, there are intervening considerations.

A brief seasonal reflection

Nature is given to frequent changes of linen, and our semi-arid prairie just received a thick new blanket of snow. The snowplow driver deserved to hear “Hail to the Plowman” in our street, but people remained indoors and out of his diligent way. My husband plowed our driveway with his tractor’s plow. Effie went out for a trudge in what for her was shoulder-deep snow. My neighbor was out with a little handheld blower.

Seasons commend change; change is the proper dynamic of all life. Seasons cue every lifeform on earth. Sometimes they command resourcefulness. Sometimes they accelerate the undesired inevitable. Seasons are entirely subject to God’s will; God’s will is manifest in his seasonal work, and all things occur in their season.

While the earth remains,
Seedtime and harvest,
Cold and heat,
Winter and summer,
And day and night
Shall not cease. (Genesis 8:22)

 

And He changes the times and the seasons;
He removes kings and raises up kings;
He gives wisdom to the wise
And knowledge to those who have understanding.  (Daniel 2:21)

And He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority. (Acts 1:7)

(New King James Version (NKJV). Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.)

In the far background are the basalt hills of Hells Canyon

“So inviting, and yet so cold. . .”

“I can stay in and take naps and play with toys. . .”