Category: Musings
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From lake to loch . . .
A week ago I stood on the shore of Lake Ahmic in northern Ontario (the near north, as my father liked to say, south of North Bay on Lake Nipissing, north of Barrie), and said goodbye to the loons, a perennial favourite of my mother. A couple of days ago we sat on a strategic…
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The lovely names
The lovely names I tell myself my mother would have loved to hear the names of the wild flowers we’ve met: stichwort; snowberry; loosestrife; sea thrift and speedwell; woundwort; red campion meadowsweet; big trefoil; celandine; kippernut; angelica; bugle I really don’t know if she would, if she would have enjoyed the new names rolling around…
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Potluck Hellebores
It’s difficult to find the correct attribution for the often-quoted aphorism ‘A society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.’ But Roger Pearse has made a good stab at the challenge, and believes that the line can be attributed to a Quaker thinker, D. Elton Trueblood, in his…
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Conscientious reading today
Today, although there’s some driving ahead, mostly my job is to read and to think. Read conscientiously, looking at submissions from the lovely Writers Groups I belong to, thinking and reflecting on the turn of phrase, the development of the creative effort. I may snuggle down into reading for pleasure as sleep beckons, but mostly…
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Forget it, corvids . . .
We’ve finally finished sorting out Mr Duck’s patch with biosecurity netting. It turned out that the rails I had laying around were exactly the right size to be supports for the jackdaw-proof netting, and so the task was relatively easy to facilitate. The challenge has been that the jackdaws, especially if they go in two-by-twos,…
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Green Island
The midgies swarmed the shoreline, but they didn’t follow us out onto the loch. We were prepared, nevertheless, with our anti-midgie spray, our hats and mesh netting but these accoutrements weren’t necessary after all. I gradually got the hang of the oars in the oarlocks and we moved steadily toward our first destination. But on…
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Our first salad from our downsized delight . . .
They say you need to pick the baby leaves of the mixed salad crop so as to enjoy their special piquant flavour and delicacy, and so that’s what we did last evening just before dinner. Very tasty with slices of cherry tomatoes and avocado in a simple olive oil and white balsamic vinegar dressing. Delish!…
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Life’s resets . . .
As I neared sleep, after a lovely day, I had an idea for a ‘joy’ entry that I had to email myself about in case I forgot. This morning I was glad I’d had the presentiment to make a note. I was thinking about the resets we may undergo in life. How many do we…
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But the clematis has gone crazy!
Perhaps it thrives on neglect, this climbing flower at our back door here in Sparty Lea. Or perhaps this season is just its time, but for whatever reason, the flowers are magnificent. I have a little job today, to fix an errant trellis back to the wall where it’s gone awry. But mostly I expect…
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Six grasses and two cuckoos
We began with the hairgrass, and eyes opened to new possibilities, proceeded to identify five more species of grass along the marshland twirl. Thanks iPlant/PictureThis. Common velvet, meadow foxtail, false oat grass, reed canary grass and rough bluegrass. And many of our stops interspersed with competing cuckoos calling for a mate. The marshland feels like…
Roads to Joy 