GO HERE. FREE THOUSAND DOLLAR BILL! I was lying about the money. But I do hope you will go to my neonatal MT weblog this weekend. I have posted a series of three images (Autumn Entomology) over at the new Fragments this weekend. Hope you'll swing by. The theme lately seems to be mushrooms and more insects. I'll have a long-winded grampa story, probably tomorrow. Oh joy!. If things go well and a few more things get cleared up, I may plan to make the move, for good, next weekend. I'll let you know. Meanwhile... FEEDBACK PLEASE re the new page....readability, colors, font size, anything! (Either here, or at FRAGMENTS (potential) NEW HOME.

Terrestrial Starfish I am feeling fungal. Look out for 'shrooms pictures in the coming weeks, if we can only get some badly needed moisture in the ground. Those little spores are just lying down there waiting for a bath so they can, well, pop up like mushrooms on a wet lawn. Meet the Earth Star fungus, Geaster. Looks a little bit like a starfish, don't you think? Once, many years ago (notice how many of my little fables start in just this way?) I was hiking in some new place with some new friends. We happened upon a group of the Earthstars like you see here....quite a colony of them, and they looked as if they were preparing to march down to the creek at any minute. My friend, Jean, was amazed, having never seen anything like this before. "What are they, Fred?" And in my most professorial and authoritative voice, I said "These are quite rare. They are terrestrial Echinoderms: relatives of the starfish that have left their aquatic environment and become tolerant of land conditions. They remain dormant for many years in the moist soil of a very few remote locations. These have matured and will be heading down to the creek, where some will succeed in mating, sending their small spawn downstream, eventually to the sea." Or some such malarky. I used to be very good at spontaneous biological BS. Jean was such a smart gal. After I heard that she had repeated my fairy tale to other students at the college, I confessed that I was full of Shitake and these were really mushrooms. I don't think she ever believed a word I said after that. And you probably don't either. Right?

Origins of the universe There is a theory that states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory that states that this has already happened. Thanks Dr. Tim

Hey little kid. Wanna piece of candy? Fragments is one step closer to its (potential) future new home with a new coat of paint. A few people have stopped by, bringing muffins and pies and such, the neighborly thing to do, you know. I would really like it if more of you dropped in to tell me if you like the way I have decorated, the color of paint in the sitting room, that sort of thing. Keep in mind that this is, hopefully, not the final resting appearance of Fragments' new home...just a start. I have already heard that at least in some entries, the text appears centered, when it was written left-justified. If anything looks weird, let me know, and tell me what browser you use, screen resolution, that sort of thing. But be kind. (I already know that the color for linked text doesn't fit well with background colors brought over from blogger. Just squint a little, okay!?) And if any of you MT types have suggestions on how I can make this a relatively painless transition without losing my place in search engines, disappearing from bookmark lists, that sort of thing...I'm all ears (well, probably mostly legs). If you just insist on a housewarming gift (in advance, mind you, of my final move) I could really use the following: 1) advice on where and in what template to add script for GeoButton, SiteMeter and Extreme Tracking; 2) how do I customise the header to include an image, different script for the title; and 3) a Jaccuzzi big enough for 8 and a couple bottles of Boones Farm Tickled Pink. If you would just go here, I have something for you over there. Come on. Piece of candy...come on. Just move that little mousey thing a little closer...that's it. Now click. Then come back here and snoop around. There will be a yard sale soon at Blogspot Fragments. If you see anything you want, since you're a regular visitor: it's half price. And we may throw in a free cat. UPDATE/Sat. 31 Aug: Comments so far: 1) prob with dark bkg and light text 2) text too small 3) archive text appears centered in all imported entries from blogger to MT. • Dark bkg is good for image appearance, as in blogger Fragments, I think, vs image against white bkg, so will try to find a work-around. • Prob 1 and 2 can be solved by using a one-cell table template, as I have done this morning with the Cat Godess entry. What do you think? Cell bkg color can be altered, as I have on Fragments/blogger, limited by light blue links font appearance. • Prob 3: May be corrected by changes made this morning to archiving method in MT. Or not. May be vestige of import oddities from blogger to MT and won't be a prob with entries created in MT. Or not. BTW, a whopping thanks to Fran of Northwest Notes for her persistance in helping me problem solve this particular problem. She, lucky girl, is going on an outting this weekend, so look for more great Northwest images soon. Thanks for your help during this (possible) birthing process. I burn hot and cold. I wake up with night sweats. I have bad dreams. Bene Diction feels my pain. Right?

Mushroom Magic If it has been wetter where you live than around here, the fall mushrooms should be showing their heads above the leaf litter soon. Even with cool, drizzly weather of the past few days, we are way behind on rainfall, and I feel certain the soil will not be wet enough to trigger the amazingly fast growth spurt that sends mushrooms up from underground, overnight, as if 'by magic'. Mushrooms have a magic quality for this reason, and are prominent in the lore of many folk tales because they appear to pop up instantly, out of nowhere. One August many years ago, I was out on a 'foray' by myself, out in the National Forest near Speedwell, Virginia. I could go back to the exact spot right now. I can't remember if I was looking for anything in particular...probably just scouting for a place to take a biology class on a field trip. There was nothing remarkable about the second growth forest along the creek, just open mixed hardwoods with a few large white pines that somehow got left in the last timbering 'harvest'. Through the undergrowth, I spotted a cluster of unfamiliar mushrooms, and pushed my way through the huckleberry and fetterbush to get a better view. It was like pushing aside the curtains into a fantasy land, a Disneyesque storybook scene from Hansel and Gretel. Over at least an acre of forest floor there were growing stout, thick archtypical mushrooms...heavy-stemmed, with smooth yellow-brown and red-brown caps like buffed suede, like rounded loaves of magical bread. Thousands of them growing singly and in dense clusters like antlers, from the bases of trees, and out in the open...I half-expected to see them hanging from tree branches. It literally made the hair on my arms stand up, it was so eerie. Needless to say, I took many photos, using my large Buck Folding Hunter knife for size comparison. And of course, I brought a few specimens back to identify. It was definitely a boletus of some kind...one of the pored mushrooms versus those with gills. It was easy to find in my field guide: Boletus edulis. Common names: porcini, cèpe, steinpilz, and king bolete. Prized and widely consumed in Europe. More common in the U.S. northwest, occasionally in the east. Edibility: CHOICE. I turned around and headed back to the enchanted forest with a big washtub. I easily filled it, leaving many intact boletes behind to sporulate and hopefully establish new colonies in the area. Very few of the ones I collected were previously occupied: it is rare to find these mushrooms before the slugs, which feed off the outside and their little nibbles can be trimmed away, and the fly larvae (maggots) that eat their tunnels all through the stems and caps. Most of the ones I collected were in perfect condition: firm, white flesh, inch-thick stipes or stems, with pores underneath of a greenish or yellowish color. We canned them. Big mistake. Second mistake: we left the porous part underneath the cap on when we canned them. In the end we had about 8 quarts of eel-slime. If we had it to do over again, we would have trimmed the pores off first, and strung the pieces of 'mushroom meat' on a string over the woodstove to dry, to make an outstanding mushroom soup base that regrettably, we have only read about. I understand it is to die for. Sigh. I have seen only perhaps a dozen individual specimens of Boletus edulis since that first encounter with the teeming hordes of them twenty years ago. There may yet be some Honeycaps or Meadow Mushrooms in our woods during the next couple of months, if we finally get rain. But for sure, the enchanted encounter with King Bolete is my ultimate fungal fantasy fulfilled. By the way, I returned to that same magic spot in the forest again at the same time of year for several years after that, and never saw a single boletus edulis growing there. All the more to make my one-time chance discovery seem the stuff of fairies and elves. Image Source

Talking Heads Yesterday, in my travels through the foggy wilderness, the radio was on constantly: to keep me awake, keep me company, and of course, to keep me fully and accurately informed as to what is happening in the world beyond Goose Creek. (I had almost forgotten that there was one). I heard several U. S. authorities speaking on how we should take out every nation that threatens, or one day, years...decades down the road...might threaten us. I heard an interviewer totally maul a well-spoken 'guest' (like the roast on our table tonight will be a guest) who believed we should weigh the evidence before launching a unilateral and globally-unsported war on Iraq. The poor man would begin to support his answer in a most reasonable and well-crafted answer. He was cut off, time and again, by the radio-host, whose owned the microphone, and whose point of view was very loudly and obnoxiously 180 degrees opposite the speaker. The rude 'moderator' made every effort to make the guest expert look like an idiot, with quite the opposite result. It was embarassing and disgusting. I listened a Saudi representative convey the Saudi and consensus-world opinion regarding the US's threat to create reality to suit its needs and mete out its own 'justice'. The man came across as a gentleman and a statesman, and I am hearing few of those from our side, I regret to say. And, per my usual, I listened to NOAA Weather Radio. Ah, the weather. Something real. Uncontrived. Practical. And read to me by a variety of male and female text-to-speech robots. You can never go wrong with The Weather. Of all these radio voices, my favorite was the robot talking about the weather. Without guile, political bias, or greed. I would have appreciated a nicer forecast for today, thanks. Everybody's talking about the weather and no body's doing anything about it. Everybody's wanting to do something about Iraq without talking about it. I dunno.

Driving, Hopefully You know my fondness for clouds and flowers and photography. Today, I had expected a close and joyous encounter with all of them. I would be driving for two hours on the Blue Ridge Parkway, during the gentle light of the morning hours, with the equivalent of 20 rolls of film, during the peak of the autumn bloom of goldenrod, Joe Pye Weed, Iron Weed, and the blue and yellow asters of Fall. How I have looked forward to this morning. And how it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. My objective, aside from bringing home photos, was to fetch home my son, Nathan, and Lori, his companion, from over a week on the Appalachian Trail. We had heard from them just once, from a campground, on an unscheduled side excursion to a grocery store that no longer existed. Once again in Nate's life, he was rescued by the kindness of strangers: an elderly gentleman who went out of his way to help two waifs along on their foolish journey through the woods in the midst of an August heat wave. Plans for recovering the two hikers at the end of their trip was necessarily sketchy, since they only knew approximately where they would be on any given day. Finally the plan we came up with was that I was to pick them up south of the Thunderhill Shelter, where the Trail crosses the Parkway. They would be walking south on the Parkway, this side of the shelter. That way, no matter when I left home and they began walking from the shelter, we would find each other. But, being a firm believer in Murphy's Laws, especially his laws of travel, anything that can go wrong, will, well...you guessed it. Not that it was really anybody's fault...just one of the vagaries of foot travel and nature. As it turns out, for the first time in many weeks, there was enough moisture in the air today to produce not the rain we severely need, but fog. Boiling up out of the piedmont to meet the cooler air held aloft on the backbone of the Blue Ridge, the warm, wet air produced the cloud I was hoping to photograph, and all but obscured the road I was required to drive along to find Nate and Lori. If you have ever been on the Parkway in the fog, you understand that 70 miles of this a white-knucled experience. I reached the milepost beyond which I expected at any moment to see the kids, a splash of color in the grayness on the side of the road, trudging south to meet me. But I could have driven past them, within 30 feet of them, and not seen them, the fog was that impenetrable; and by that time, there was enough moisture to produce rain, driven sideways by 30 mile winds. I passed the vicinity of the shelter, then 3 more miles, and no kids. I was a few minutes earlier than I had told them to expect me. Maybe they hadn't reached the road yet. Maybe I had passed them coming up the mountain. I had no idea which. So I drove all the way back to Peaks of Otter Visitors Center, since this was our emergency post, where we would meet up or they would call if plans fell apart, which I always try to anticipate and plan for. Twelve miles back through the fog, a quick conversation with the lady in the Visitors center: tell them to stay here if they show up. I'll be back. And then back up the mountain, through the fog, and the wind, and the rain. By this time, my eyes were going squeeky with all the back and forth roadside scans for anything that looked like wet humans. I began to catastrophize: what if one of them were injured a day or two back on the trail, without a phone, not near a road. There were not a lot of hikers out this time of year. Only knuckleheaded invincible college kids, and one of them was mine. What if Nate meant another shelter and used the wrong name? Of maybe I had somehow been lysdexic when I wrote all of this down the night of the surprise phonecall from the trail. What if...? I approached parkway mile 75. If I didn't see them in the next mile, it was going to be a whole different day. Parkway rangers, phone calls home saying "Honey we lost the kids". My stomach tied in a knot. And where ever they were, even dressed for the wet, with this wind and cool temps, they could become hypothermic quickly. I did my best to control all the negatives. This was out of my hands. We had asked for 'big angels' for them in their travels; and now, if their angels could just manage to find a little Goretex... At the moment just before despair, the apparition of human shapes appeared against a backdrop of dripping Rhododendrons and windswept hardwoods saying goodbye to their leaves. Beautiful sight, this. They had waited until the last minute to leave the shelter for the cold, wet road. Matter of fact, they said, "We saw you go by the first time. We were just 100 feet down the trail in the fog and saw you slow down. We waved like crazy, but we knew you could'nt see us. We knew you'd be back. Eventually". And so, we are home, warm, dry, fed and happy. The house is strewn with damp memories of the past two weeks' walk. The kids have put on a movie: One Flew Over A Cuckoo's Nest. Indeed. One drove through it. Just today.

Do Dogs Have Souls? Dave, I hope Mr. MacDonald is right.

Bad Backyard Baby Bewwies It is curious, now, since becoming a weblogger, what kinds of things trigger the urge to write. What would have been an occasion only for a short, silent solioquy about a thing remembered, a sensation, an enlightened moment, now becomes an impulse to write, that the tree might not fall in the forest unheard. The joy of words that can be shared is greater than words unformed and spoken to me as the only listener. And so, this journal. There is joy in the writing, and that is enough. On the other hand: readers, well, caveat emptor. Today while wandering over in the meadow, I found a familiar plant, a weed by most reckoning, that used to grow along our border fence when we lived in Wytheville and our daughter was maybe two years old. A beautiful plant, really, and a relative of its much more well known cousin, the tomato. It is a climbing vine, with star-shaped blue flowers that look like potato flowers, with dark green leaves and translucent crimson berries born in broad clusters. And I remembered the place of this plant in the lore of the First family. Little Holli was rarely left unattended, but for a short while, we let her wander her way around our fenced yard that had pretty well been baby-proofed. We went about our chores inside, probably involved to the top of our hip waders in canning, as it was mid-August and the vegetable avalanche usually let loose about this time. After a bit, Holli appeared at the top step, carrying a long green bough of some plant she had found in the yard. I went to investigate. "I eat da bewwies". I took the plant from her, thinking at first it was a honeysuckle vine. Uh-oh. Blue flowers, red berries. Bitter nightshade. Also called Deadly Nightshade. Huston, we have a problem. "Holli, did you eat the berries?" She shook her head "NO". This called for maternal wisdom. Ann took a shot at it. "Holli, did you eat the berries?" "I eat da bewwies" she said, and now we were totally confused. Why would she have volunteered that she ate them if she didn't? But every other time we asked her, she denied it. I wasn't sure how poisonous the bewwies were, but a plant doesn't get the epithet "deadly" as a joke. So, lacking the necessary emetic in the household medicine cabinet, and hesitant to have little Holli drink soapy water, or sticking our finger down her throat, I was off in the VW Beetle with the emergency lights flashing, off to the only drug store in town to get some syrup of Ipecac (Don't you love that name? I think it is onomatopoeia, imitating the sound of wretching, but that's just a theory). Two spoonsful produced the desired effect. Poor Holli was clueless. The parental units spend most of their days scurrying around trying to protect her from things that would injure her or make her sick, and now they were feeding her Puke Potion, holding a plastic pail under her face, saying "Spit it up! Spit it up!" Which she obligingly did. Grape Kool-aid, a few cheerios, and some fuzz from her favorite blanket. No bewwies. Well, that was a learning experience. Next time, it won't be Solanum dulcamara fruits, I would see to that, and we will have the Wonder Potion on hand, because there will be a next time. I couldn't really blame Holli; it was probably my fault. Even at that age, I wondered how many times she had seen me drop to my knees along a trail or forest edge and crush-sniff-nibble some wild plant. She was just stalking the wild asparagus. Like father, like dau. When I visited Holli in Wyoming back in the summer, I made sure that their fence was free of anything poisonous. I forgot to ask if they had Syrup of Ipecac in their medicine cabinet. I didn't want the granddaughter to eat anything that might make her sick. But there are some things a parent or grandparent just can't anticipate a child doing, you know what I mean? Image source

The Long Way Home: A Puppydog Tale I am almost serious when I tell folks that I would have rather left one of my children behind than my dog. It was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do and I will never, ever forget it. Telling the story will help me remember our first family dog, Zachary, and his incredible journey home. But before that, I'll have to put the tale in the context of another story, our Finding our Place on Goose Creek. Eventually, the long story will all get tied up in one bundle together, like a picnic lunch in a wicker basket, covered in a gingham table cloth. Or something like that. In a year of tough decisions, I had chosen to leave a very comfortable career teaching biology at a southwest Virginia community college, and do something else; anything else. As fate would have it, in one week in the spring of 1986, after having no choices for what seemed like forever, now there were two. I had recently interviewed for a teaching position at Gainesville College (now University) in Georgia, north of Atlanta. At the same time, I had taken a tremendous and audacious leap of self-conceit by applying for acceptance to a Physical Therapy masters program. Not many programs, just one: University of Alabama at Birmingham, back in my home town. All my eggs were in one basket, and especially back then, many applied and few were accepted into a PT graduate program. I was waiting to hear if, by some miracle, I had been accepted. On Wednesday, I got a call saying that I had been offered the teaching job. I was shocked! It would mean teaching at a larger institution, with a different set of roads, trails, and people...a new start, in a way. But in another way, this would be just another teaching job. I would be digging the same hole deeper, really. I was pretty sure that doing the same thing in a different place was enough of a change and we would probably be moving to Georgia. I told them I would let them know my answer in 48 hours. On Thursday, I came from teaching a class and there was a note taped to my door. "Please call Marilyn Gossman". It took me a while to figure out who that was. When I saw the Alabama area code, it dawned on me that this was the Director of the PT Masters Program at UAB in Birmingham. I had been accepted to the program. New town, new friends, tremendous challenge, and a whole new hat to wear...this would be digging for treasure in a new hole. I knew immediately that it was what I ought to do. The decision would change everything, for all my family, for the rest of our lives. The following week after the decision had been made, we began to sort through all of the giant steps it would take to make this transition in our lives: find a house in Birmingham, find work for Ann, schools for the kids. Sell the farm and sell or give away our country tools...wouldn't be needing a tiller in Birmingham. And...oh my gosh: what would we do with Zachary, our best friend Black Lab, our country dog for 6 years? The choice was between keeping him tied up or penned like a prisoner in our new suburban life, or finding someone near our country home where there would be kids and wide open spaces for him to roam, the freedom of the life he had always known. We began to ask around for a good family to adopt Zachary, and soon found them. Zach's new family were strangers to us, friends of friends, and lived all the way across the county beyond Fort Chiswell. I called and got directions, and loaded ol' Zach into the cab of the truck. He was not a comfortable traveler, because the only place he ever road in the truck was to the vet, about three miles away. He trembled all the way across the county, while I pretended that I had convinced myself that I felt nothing. Just a dog. This was a business transaction, the right thing to do. I made our introductions quickly to the new family, who briefly explained the layout of their farm and why this was a good place for a dog to live. I hurried back to the truck and retreated down their gravel drive like a man leaving the scene of a hit-and-run. I looked in the rear-view mirror to see Zachary sitting on the front porch, with children's arms around his neck, wagging his tail and watching me drive away. I rarely cry but I cried then, all the way back to the home that was ours no longer. The next year was as hard on all of us as we had expected. I became what the kids called "the man downstairs", since they rarely saw me that I was not down there studying. It was much harder than I had imagined to be the student I needed to be, plus husband, father, home owner, son. The year was a barely tolerable blur. Somehow, we made it to the end of our second summer in Birmingham. The day before classes started, some thirteen months after leaving our country home, the phone rang. Ann took the call, and an odd expression took shape on her face as we watched the conversation. It was the people that had bought our farm back in Virginia. They told her "There's a strange dog showed up here a couple days ago. He's a big black dog, and he stays under the porch here. He's right thin and his paws don't look so good. He's okay, but he just seems sort of lost and confused". The neighbors down the road say they think he's your old dog. Could it be? We called the neighbors down the road. "Yep, that's Zachary all right. He jumped out from behind the boxwoods when we rode the horses up the road today, just like he always did. It's him for sure". We were stunned, overjoyed, but confused and uncertain what to do. "It's Zachary and he found his way home and he's looking for us and Fred, you have to go get him", Ann said through tears of joy and grief and the shock of our dog born again. I knew she was right, we had to go. But bringing Zachary here to Birmingham made no more sense now that it would have a year earlier. Even so, the next day, driven by forces well beyond reason, my daughter and I drove 10 hours to southwest Virginia to see if it was really our pup. And it was. Less of him than we left, and a bit confused when he first saw us. But he responded to all of the commands he used to obey, just like we had never been apart. He sure was bedraggled, and had some white hair among the black, prematurely old at six puppy years. Of course we have yearned for this to be a world where dogs could talk. We have never stopped wondering how he made it 13 miles as the crow flies, across a mountain, a very busy interstate, and many, many busy roads through unfamiliar territory, to home. And then, when he finally arrived, we weren't there. What must he have thought and felt! It was evident from the way he looked, his travels had taken him months. And yet he had persisted, driven by the need to find his pack, his tribe, his huggers and feeders and stick-throwers and ear scratchers; his family, not the substitute family of strangers that did these things and called him by his name, and it was not the same. To leave and find home must have been a driving need in his doggie mind from that first week in his adopted home, after waiting and waiting, then knowing I was not coming back for him and he would have to make the trip on his own. But of course, we would never know his thoughts and his experiences. All we knew was that Zachary was going to be part of our lives again, for better or for worse. And so, the next day, we sedated him, hauled his 100 pounds into the back of the Subaru, and took him to his new home in suburbia. And so Zachary's life after his long trip home was anticlimax. Mostly. The story is not quite over. The old boy had fit in fine in the country, where he could roam the fields and woods at will, he spent the nights in the shed on a thick bed of straw, and if he barked, the closest neighbors was far enough not to be bothered by it. Life in suburbia was going to be different. Very different. What to do with him there in town we would have to put together as we went along. We really weren't prepared for this. For the time being, during the first week back with us, he would stay in the garage during the day when we were away at work and schools. Friday of Zach's first week back, I drove up to the garage door after a long, long day, and hit the remote control to raise the door, so looking forward to the relative peace of a weekend. And before me, as the doors went up, the curtains were drawn on a disaster scene: the entire two car garage was covered with dust and splinters and yellow fiberglass insulation. There was a huge hole in the sheetrock wall that separated the garage from the house. Had there been a gas explosion? Were the kids alright? I rushed up the front steps in a panic. The whole family greeted me at the door, anticipating my reaction to the explosion downstairs. They all spoke excitedly at once, and they were defending the dog. "It's not his fault. He didn't mean to!" What were they saying? That day, there had been a thunderstorm. Zach never did like storms. Back in the country, he could get under the house, or in his shed, and seemed to weather them just fine. But a fierce storm when he was in a strange, unfamiliar place made him go berserk. When the kids got home from school, they found him in the closet under the stairs. He was covered with sheetrock dust and insulation, having eaten his way through the wall to get into the house. Holy Smokin'Cow! A week later, he began limping. Something to do with his demolition work on the house? We never knew. What we did find out was that he had a torn ACL tendon in his knee, and to make a long story short, we ended up paying an astronomical amount to repair the painful knee, to avoid having to put him to sleep. We could hardly consider that, after all he, and we, had been through. So, it was an interesting period of puppy enculturation to life in the big city. It was not easy. We had made the right decision to leave him behind. But then Zachary had made his own decision, and of course, a dog's decision is always final. Zach stayed with us through two more moves in North Carolina. Finally, at age 12, he was elderly, in dog years. He had become decrepit and uncomfortable and incontinent. He was not going to be with us much longer, and each day was a misery for him. We made the decision to send him out of this world painlessly. It was a tough thing to do. But I think, looking back, that euthanasia was an easier decision than to leave our good friend with strangers, thinking he would never see us again, and now knowing he would never rest until he found us.

The Peace Eagle I have had second thoughts. Perhaps I painted the Turkey Vulture in too unkindly a light. I came to this conclusion after watching their graceful and exuberant performance riding the thermals over our pasture before an approaching storm yesterday. Magnificent, graceful, uplifting. My apologies for any slight to these birds in my entry the other day, and also for the mild taxonomic faux pas, for purists who eschew common names, in calling this creature a BUZZARD. In common usage, they are called turkey buzzards, carrion crows, and red-necked buzzards. Buzzards, in correct usage, applies to some of the hawks of Europe, I believe. New World vultures, on the other hand, are classified in the same large bird group as storks and flamingos. This group also includes the California Condor, a larger bird with a better reputation than the lowly vulture only because of its rarity and its impressive size. The Turkey Vulture's scientific name is noteworthy: cathartes aura. Catharsis. Purification; cleansing. Ugly bird, nice name. Like the American Turkey, both Black and Turkey Vultures have heads free of feathers. This does little for appearance, but is a definite advantage in hygiene, since both vultures are primarily, although not exclusively, feeders from the carcasses of dead animals. (Up to 50% of their diet can come from grasses, leaves and seeds). They are exquisitely suited to their feeding methods, most notably in the fact that they can eat decaying meat that is foul-smelling and dense with bacteria and viruses, and suffer no ill effects. The disinfecting abilities of the their digestion is being studied, for instance, in possible ways to inactivate such organisms as the hanta virus. The droppings and regurgitated pellets from the carcasses they process are free of disease organisms. They further disinfect their own bodies by urinating on their featherless legs; this may also serve to cool them down in very hot conditions, which they tolerate rather well. Whatever, it is another negatively-endearing trait that ranks this bird at the very bottom of most peoples 'favorite birds' list. While some folks are rather fond of it. We have both kinds of 'buzzards' over our valley for much of the year. Some notable differences separate them. The Turkey Vulture is larger, feeds more by smell, and tends to soar gracefully with few wing beats, sometimes for hours without rest. It is said that Turkey Vultures tend to circle over natural gas leaks, being able to smell the mercaptans that are added to the odorless gas, since this substance is also present in decaying flesh. Their ability to find even a small, hidden food source far below is remarkable. And once found by one, somehow this is communicated to many others, quickly. How, we do not know. The soaring flight of the Turkey Vulture is perhaps its most redeeming esthetic quality, for those of you who are put off by close-up appearance and reprehensible choice of foods and feeding. From below, the outline of a soaring Turkey Vulture is that of a broad "W". Seen from behind or in front, black vulture wings are more or less straight across from wingtip to wingtip, while the Turkey Vulture's wings form a shallow "V", with the body of the bird at the low point of the V. I once sat up on a favorite high point, Monster Rock, in Wythe County, watching the sun go down. From overhead came a sound like a speeding bullet. I looked up just in time to see a Turkey Vulture pull up out of a steep and amazingly fast dive, which it repeated over and over. They do seem to fly for fun, and vicariously, I soar with them. I was not aware that among those that migrate each year, they tend to return to the same summer roosting areas precisely on the vernal equinox. This year, I will be watching for them on that day. Pardon this long winded pean to an unappreciated bird that the Cherokee called the "Peace Eagle". I think maybe when it is time for me to teach the birds to my grandchildren, this is what we will call them.

Almost Not Quite It looked at first as if the birthing process for the MT blog had gone well. All past entries imported properly, with the immense help of my benefactor (benefactress?) who did all the work. Then, I must have backed up into some switches or levers or something, and all my sidebar stuff is now at the very end of the log. I haven't the faintest idea how to fix it. If any of you Moveable Typers have any ideas, take a look here to see the problem. Maybe I should just put a bullet through its head and start all over again. Color me discouraged. Getting there is only part of the battle. Even after correcting the current screw-up, I will need to tinker with the template/style sheet, and I don't know my elbow from my acetabulum about this. Ah, life at the bottom of the learning curve. Meanwhile, there is always Blogspot. Well, sometimes. Occasionally. UPDATE 8/26/02: Sidebar issue was apparently due to having just slightly too little space in my browser window to allow the right frame to display properly. Duh. But what happens with folks with lower screen resolutions, larger fonts, etc. Won't that make the page look goofy? Now, finding NO tutorials for MT other than in their HELP files, it is with fear and trembling I will begin to 'tweak' in MT to get a new look. I will attempt to dual-post for the coming weeks, so there will be some continuity when 'the big day' finally arrives. Next week, next month or next year. Meanwhile, hand-holding is in order. Anyone? Anyone? MT offers just a small couple of alternate templates/stylesheets. Where do folks come up with the snazzy ones I see out there among you higher organisms of the Blogoshere?

The Apples of Love We are reaching the peak of the onslaught in the vegetable wars. The Veggies are winning. Especially the tomatoes. As if the Romas, and the yellow and big red varieties were not enough, the 'tommy-toes'...cherry tomatoes...were almost too many to pick today. Then, once picked and filling the bowl, they were too pretty to just eat outright. So, here is a TommyToe family portrait. It will be pleasant to look back through these summer images in December, when the cold, short days deny the colors and smells and motion of summer. I will recall from memory in winter the smell and taste of the pomme d'amour, the apple of love, fresh off the vine in a green garden flashing with red and gold.

The Ways of Love Having read the following, I feel better now about my anthropomorphic similes, analogies and metaphors. Can you guess what eeksy-peeksy is describing here? To try this at home, the man might strip naked and use his feet to grip the woman, also naked, by her neck so that they form a long chain of nakedness. Vertically, he would be standing on her shoulders. She would then curl up to copulate with him (while he continues to hold her head by his feet) and then uncurl into the original position. Now comes the tricky part. He grasps a tree branch growing above a natural body of water and hangs there with her suspended by her neck from his feet. The two would then swing as one (like tandem gymnasts on a bar) while her abdomen slaps repeatedly into the mud.

Only That Day Dawns... We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Henry David Thoreau

The Black Birds of Goose Creek I had been sitting for some time with my back up against a large leaning white pine, up the valley there, where the Rhododendrons on the banks meet at their tops, forming a green tunnel that hides the riffles and pools of our nameless creek. I decided it was time to head home. Maybe I had stood up too fast. I felt more than heard a rushing noise, so low frequency it seems to be coming from inside me, a visceral sensation somewhat familiar to me. It's not my heart racing, as I first suspected. This kind of thing happens in the spring, when the ruffed grouse are drumming: you feel the thudding of that mating display in your guts more than hear it through your ears; and more than once, I thought I was having tachycardia. I felt this inside. It was a whirring, rushing sound; sounds, plural, like helicopter rotors, very soft ones, hundreds of them, and it reached consciousness that it was happening overhead. I looked up not knowing if the something was going up, or coming down on top of me. Boat-tail grackles, at least a hundred of them, had roosted for the night, and I must have startled them when I stood up. Startled me, too. But after putting the sound into context, I was able to appreciate that this was one of my cherished 'signs of Fall'...the blackbirds of Goose Creek becoming restless, congregating around their migratory maps, bickering about the best route and the best timing, and of course, who would lead and who would follow. Grackles and starlings, I am not unhappy to see them go. Starlings, grackles, crows, ravens, buzzards: the black birds of Goose Creek, from smallest to largest. My personal favorite is, without question, the raven. Most ravens pass through our area over a month or two in the spring, and again in the Fall. A dozen or so hang around for the winter here and I love to see them soar and glide, with their distinctive fan-shaped tails. Despite their urban garbage-seeking behaviors in some places, in these parts, they are very reclusive and wary birds. More than once, I have watched as one approached from the far ridge, heading so as to pass overhead. From a quarter mile, I can tell it has just spotted me standing down there, a bare speck, as he wheels 90 degrees to make a wide circle around me before resuming his intended path. When I am in the woods, they pass overhead not seeing me, close enough that I can hear the hard-feathered stroke of their wings. There is a nobility and intelligence about ravens that earns my respect. I was very near one only once, when out driving around the back roads with an older neighbor. We found it on the side of the road, injured, and brought it home to nurse back to health. My first impression was the amazing size of the thing...standing about 24 inches tall, with a heavy 4" beak and a regal bearing. This one looked me straight in the eye with intent, unlike anything I have ever known from a lesser creature than a dog. That was my only close encounter with ravens until one fogbound freezing winter day a few years back. A dozen or more had flocked in a dense stand of mature trees not 100 feet from our cabin. This was not their usual rookery, but the fog probably made them bed down early and right where they found themselves late one afternoon, when the fog settled in so thick that you could barely see your hand at the end of your arm. I read in a National Geographic later that more than 50 raven calls, or vocalizations had been identified; not random squawks but meaningful messages indicating mood or purpose. Like many birds, ravens make different sounds from a roost than when single or in pairs, and marauding for food. That winter afternoon, I heard so many and varied and bizarre sounds from that accidental rookery...I won't even attempt to describe this...that I will never see or hear a raven again without remembering that incredible day. When our ravens pass over the valley here, we hear only two calls. One is a hoarse rasping "RAUWK". I have a theory that the other name for the raven, "ROOK", is onomatopoeia, imitating this sound; I haven't been able to confirm that, so I preach it as gospel. The second call is my favorite, and I associate it with the pleasure of flight. It has been called their "TONK" call, described as a "metallic thunk". To me, it is more fluid, like a smooth pebble dropped down a deep well. I watched a raven last fall flying high over the pasture. Every little bit, it would make the 'water sound', then fold its wings and plummet like a stone, rise high and then repeat it. Pardon my anthropomorphic interpretation, but that call was saying "Life is good. Wings are wonderful. Watch this!" The crows are good for mobbing hawks and owls. You can often see a dark shape silhouetted against the sky up on the ridge, sitting there in disgust while 40 crows swoop and caw, passing in rapid arcs down in front of the raptor, purely out of a stong need to harrass. They do the same thing in flight, and seeing a redtailed hawk wheel over so its talons face the approaching crow is always worth craning your neck to see. And Buzzards: you can most always see two or three making lazy circles high overhead, riding the thermals that boil up out of the valley. Unlike the ravens, the black and turkey buzzards do not speak to me of intelligence. They are carrion-feeding opportunists, and necessary in the economy of nature, but I am content to watch them from a great distance, so they appear graceful and merely black. Up close, well, some things you just want to leave to your imagination.

Writers Block Party. Nobody Home at Fragments Well, well. Let's see. I don't really have anything prepared to tell you this morning. How odd. Usually I have a subject just waiting to be painted in words (I usually use a 9" roller)...a folksy veggie tale, a platitude about country life, slides from our summer vacation...something. Today: nada. Between finishing up the painting on the steps (YAY!)and putting in the Fall garden yesterday, my hands were so occupied that the word-generator shut down. Temporarily. That's a threat, or a promise, you decide. I don't quite understand how I can be in a writing slump, what with all the excitement around here this week. (Not!) As you regular readers know, I am presently a house husband, 15 miles from town, a mile from our nearest neighbor (who wishes she was 15 miles from her nearest neighbor)...just me and the dog here most days. You'd wonder I find anything to fill the pages of Fragments at all, much less multiple entries most days. Not a lot happens here in a typical day, but there are the occasional 'events'. This week, I could have written about our getting a new refrigerator... an episode not without its comedy. But then, the humor would mostly be at the expense of the wife, who insisted that we must thoroughly clean the entire house because 'we don't want those movers to think we live like pigs'. Yes, Ann: large hairy stevadors from West Virginia are known for their White-Glove inspections and high standards of cleanliness in the homes they visit in the delivery of large appliances. On the other hand, she might have had a point. I was glad she was not the one to see what lurked under the old refrigerator when I moved it out of the way for the new one. Even though I pride myself on my taxonomic skills generally, I could not even identify the organic matter under our refrigerator to KINGDOM. Taking a stab at it: mycological, Kingdom Fungi. I wondered, perhaps, if the large gray wooly mass could be harvested and processed, converted perhaps to a source of nutrition, like Quorn...the meatlike substance made from mold that has been enjoyed in Europe for years, now available (and right there in front of me in the dustpan) in the United States. Nah. I won't write about that. We are in that in-between season, neither fish nor fowl, with summer dying and autumn not yet born. I am sure when the cool weather comes in earnest, this heat-induced lethargy will fall away, the drought-dust will settle when the hurricane bands spread some real rains up our way. The writing juices will drip, then trickle and flow, and I will look back and remember the brief spell when the words wouldn't come. In the blog-introspection department: Fragments seems to have reached some sort of steady state, for the time being. There are enough visitors to keep it from echoing like an empty house. More visitors are coming from bookmarks, fewer from referrer's pages. Numbers are up a bit, visit length and page views falling. The average visit is now 2 minutes 5 seconds and headed downward. The comments ratio is about 1 comment per 30 visitors and email about the same. Geobutton has been a valuable tool now, after my first two weeks of use, with guests from Kuala Lampur, Singapore, Belarus, and many other places ...I am relearning my geography by looking up each new country that signs the guest book. I get more visits from the Northwest than the South in the US, which surprises me. Thanks to those who have read the longer pieces and seem to enjoy them. Non gustibus disputandum, don't ya reckon? Bear with me in the POSSIBLE but not-yet certain and certainly not completed process of moving Fragments to a Moveable Type location. I am going to try importing the blogspot template into a "test" MT blog this weekend, when I am here alone. If I scream, weep, wimper or drool, just pat me on the head, pretend to be sympathetic to me, and especially be nice to Ann during this time of crisis. You know, I think she sort of breathes a sigh of relief as she drives off to work each morning, knowing she doesn't have to listen to me shriek like a banshee when Blogger goes down, or the computer crashes and I lose my award-winning story on the sex-lives of the mushrooms. Dang, that one woulda been a prize winner. Ya'll have a good weekend. Thanks for sticking with me through this writers' block party this morning. I think I am unstuck, and will commence to write about grackles, crows and ravens. And you know I'm not kidding. Have a good weekend, Mrs. Calabash, where ever you are.

In the Shadow of the Buffalo It shows up as a gentle wave on the horizon here. You can see it from just about any place in the county. Although it is not quite 4000 feet in elevation, it appears prominently above the uplifted land that is Floyd County, Virginia. It is known locally, simply as "The Buffalo". Buffalo Mountain has quite a history. Less than a lifetime ago, it was a cultural holdout, a relict community of lawless Appalachian moonshiners who mistrusted everyone and lived a primative exisitence in self-imposed isolation. It is said that one man moved this mountain. He did it by acting on a call to minister to the spiritual needs of a hardscrabble community that did not readily accept his help. He eventually won them over, and they in turn helped him construct six fieldstone churches that dot the countryside today. Bob Childress is remembered fondly by the oldest generation of Floyd County residents as the man who brought churches, roads, bridges and schools to the Buffalo. Today, the Virginia Natural Heritage program protects 1000 acres of the mountain. "Widely recognized as one of Virginia's greatest natural heritage treasures, Buffalo Mountain Natural Area Preserve is like no other place in the state. A variety of unusual conditions combine to make the preserve home to 14 plant species, three invertebrate species and six natural communities that are rare in Virginia." There is a road to the base of the mountain, and a short, steep trail to the top. It is about time for us to take a hike up to the top. Want to go? Always room for one more.

The Terrible Vegetable Debacle: A Summer Song It is canning time on Goose Creek. Too much of a good thing all at once. Makes me think about a song written by my good buddy, Dennis Stamper. (Of all the wonderful, tender and beautiful songs he has written, this goofy one is perhaps one of his most requested among some circles). Those for whom English is not your native tongue, watch out for lots of 'corny' puns. Well a week ago last Tuesday, I came home from my job. I went out to the back porch and fed my old dog Bob. I walked out in the back yard, out behind the garden shed And what I saw there nearly made me drop dead. You see, way back in the springtime (you must understand) The thought of some sweet yellow corn sounded grand. Green beans, New potatos, some okra and such... I'd have sold my own mother for a 'mater sandwuch. I think that I'll plant me a garden, I said. I'll plant a little extra, just in case some drops dead. I'll plant some for my neighbors and the ladies at work, And I'll plant some for my family so they won't think I'm a jerk. All through the summer I tended it good. The rains fell and the sun shown (just like it should) The bugs stayed away. Everything went just fine. But now everything's coming in at one time. There's green beans on the table and taters in the sink And the melons on the back porch are starting to stink. And this kamikaze zucchini has really got to go. One just flew off the dryer and tried to squash my toe. The tomatoes on the window sill are pushing out the screen. They're calling up an army, and some are mean and green. They're jumping on the counter and they're rolling on the floor And they just held a briefing in my underwear drawer. My neighbors and family won't take this stuff. They say that they grow for themselves just enough. When I see all these potatoes, my eyes fill to the rim. When I see all this lettuce, my head starts to swim. I've got corn out my ears that I really must put up, And I'll can all those tomatoes if I ever ketchup. Well, it's a terrible battle but I think that I might win. I got out my vegomatic and I plugged that sucker in. Now the radishes are blushing and I saw the onions cry, And the cabbage all surrendered when I slaw the head guy. "I think that I'll plant me a garden" I cried. "Enough to feed an army". And not a danged thing died. Now my neighbors and my family and the ladies at the plant.. They all know that I ain't got the sense God gave an ant. Now friends won't you listen to this lesson that I teach. All that you sew you will someday have to reap. But there's still one thing I wonder, oh my Lord, oh my gosh! What made me think I'd need twenty hills of squash. Words and music Copyright L Dennis Stamper

Lifetime Warranty, Small Comfort You may have discerned from the nooks and crannies of Fragments that I am the kind of person who likes to hold on to a good thing. I find something that fits me, works well and becomes smooth with age, more the better. Yesterday, I had a debate with Ann in the choice of paying $3.00 or $10.00 for some hardware store item. "The $10 one is built a whole lot better. I know it's more expensive, but I would rather pay $10 and get something that will last a lifetime", I argued. She replied, "You are forgetting how old we are. Three dollars might be all you need to spend for a lifetime's worth of use". I keep her around, so as to maintain my perspective. But I bought the $10 one anyway.

Diamonds Are a Girl'a Best Friends. Or They May Be Her Siblings. Or her parents. It is now possible to attain immortality. You heard it here first. LifeGems R Us. When your loved one (including pets, of course, provided they are large enough to contain adequate carbon; Chihuahuas need not apply) breathes their last breath, be sure that the Long Black StationWagon is destined for a Life Gem Certified Mortuary, to assure the highest quality product from their earthly remains. That's right, ladies and gentlemen. You can have old Uncle Mort specially processed, his carbon extracted, compacted, polished and precision-cut, and wear him on your pinkie as a LifeGem. In fact, you may reap over 100 certified, high quality LifeGems from the old curmudgeon as memorials for each family member, the guys down at the lodge, and the mail man, with a few left over as party favors. Next time a family member tells you that have a "twinkle in your eye", or that "you are just a jewel", watch out! They may be thinking you would look great in a pair of diamond earrings.

The Joys of Home Moanership (or "House" is a Verb) Being available, in addition to being the only painter we could afford, I have undertaken to hire me to complete at least one of the dozens of indoor projects that have suffered from taskus interruptus. At the end of a long sequence of steps that started months ago with stripping pink, burgundy and blue paint off the old pine stair treads, today I was looking forward to completing the painting of the risers and trim and finally being done with at least one major inside job. I found the paint, after considerable reshuffling of boxes with labels like "NATHAN'S EMPTY TAPE CASSETTE COLLECTION", and "RANDOM STUFF FROM UNDER THE STEPS 1989" (still sealed with 1989 tape). We stored the paint cans on their tops, as in upside-down, like the painter told us to, back in farthest recesses of the immensely jam-packed Fibber McGhee store room upstairs. I guess Ann must have 'closed' the can on the trim paint last year when she finished painting the bedroom. I guess she just sort of gave a little tappy-tap and plunked it upside down. You guessed it. What a wonderful, perplexing surprise, just before the climax of my Big Job. What we have here is a gallon of Williamsburgish-green paint upside down, with a little moat of dried, very hard paint all around the rim. Option 1) leave it in place forever, and put a memorial plaque on it, commemorating one woman's slap-dash get-it-done paint clean-up history; 2) carefully try to hammer a putty knife under the lid to free it from the floor and hope that it will remain sealed by the same dry paint to the can; and 3) just kick the sucker over and deal with the consequences. I started with choice 2 which quickly transitioned to choice 3 when the lid remained a permanent part of the floor, the can came up, and 3/4 of a gallon of paint did what liquids do. A slow, pseudopodic puddle of green paint began seeking its own level. I am alone, but I call for help anyway. Maybe Buster has some ideas, 'cause I'm blank, barefoot and in my boxer shorts. I wonder if it's too late to go back to bed. Or, when in doubt, have a beer. No, no. It is always better to do SOMETHING, even if it is not the RIGHT thing. So I stop at the back door to quickly slip into my knee-high black rubber books (which coordinate nicely with my gold and black silk boxers) and run out to the shed, grab a bucket of ramdom tools, and streak back to the house in a mild but escalating panic. Find tool, fix problem, find tool fix problem. Think brain think brain think! I think I ran upstairs the first time with a nail punch and a hand auger. This definitely was not the RIGHT thing. Meanwhile, the Green Sea is spreading like an outbreak of lentil soup. I will spare you all the intermediate steps before I came up the both the idea and the actual finding of the tools to end this nightmare: a wide bladed putty knife, a plastic dust pan and a plastic bucket. When it was all over, I had scraped about a half gallon of paint into the bucket. A partial success. There is still a place for the memorial plaque, since the lid, covered with about 1/2 inch of rock-hard paint, is now a permanent part of the floor. It is now the next day. The nightmares last night were upsetting: thick green paint rising like flood waters, knee deep, while I ran around trying to find my pants. Horrible. But more disabling toward the task of finishing this cursed job today, I seem to have a mild stress fracture in my 2nd metatarsal from stepping up-down-up-down off the bench yesterday while trying to use up the spilt paint out of a open-top pail without a lid. And I notice too in the first light of dawn that the instep of my right foot is an otherworldly Williamsburgish green. Maybe I'm coming down with something.

Do I mean FISHING? Would someone please bring an slow learner up to date? I keep running into the term fisking, and I just read over it like, yeah, yeah, I sort of get the context of what that means. But frankly, I have become morbidly curious. Google is no help. It asks "Do you mean Fishing?" Dictionary.com tells me there were a couple of folks with the last name FISK, but I cannot make their histories into an everyday term. Is it a nice-i-fied version of the F-word? An inside joke among a certain small circle of bloggers who I just happen to run across, over and over again? There is a Fisk University, all black, I think. Is fisking a racial slur of some sort? Maybe a jabberwockish nonsense word? I have been left out of the loop (so, what's new?) and hope there is someone out there who can enlighten a sheltered bumpkin. Or should I just go FISKING?

Blog Pluribus Unum How does it make you feel, dear blogger, that a new weblog is added, drip-drop to the sea of Blogs once every 40 seconds? Consequently, there may be some 490,000-plus Weblogs that few people see: they make up the vast dark matter of the Blog-osphere, and portend a future where blogs behave like such previous breakthroughs as desktop publishing, presentation software and instant messaging, and become a nonremarkable part of our lives. While its sort of nice to be on the leading edge of a new web phenom, relatively speaking, I do get the sense of being first one in 100,000; then 1 in 250,000; next year, 1 in 10 million. The dilution factor takes on homeopathic proportions. As a Dark Matter Blogger, I may be one out of what-ever-denominator. But I am 1 out of 1, 100% of Fragments from Floyd. There may be a flooding ocean of words, but only those from my weblog are mine. To a small group of 'friends' those words matter. Is that any different than in the flesh and bones world...a few who know of my existance and care, and the dark matter masses of the rest of the world for whom I am 1 in 6.2 billion fellow creatures? Don't lose heart, brother and sisters that compose the bulk of the blogosphere. There is comfort in the number: ONE.

Pathos of Gardening Goodness is a large, often a prospective word; like harvest, which at one stage when we talk of it lies all underground, with an indeterminate future: is the germ prospering in the darkness? at another, it has put forth delicate green blades, and by-and-by the trembling blossoms are ready to be dashed off by an hour of rough wind or rain. Each stage has its peculiar blight, and may have the healthy life choked out of it by a particular action of the foul land which rears or neighbours it, or by damage brought from foulness afar. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda Link via Redwood Dragon

Jewels of August The seasons of spring, summer and early fall at my house are measured as much in flowers as they are in numbers on the calendar. Like old friends who always visit at the same time every year and take their places in the same seats at the table....wet stream borders, pasture margins, deep woods. Over the years, wildflowers have become good friends; I love to see them come, and hate to see them go. The Spotted Jewel Weed, seen three weeks ago singly, here and there, is now popping up in every moist depression, like the rest of us, happy for what little rain we have finally seen here in the last week. Although the flower itself could account for this particular common name, it is, in fact, the way that water beads up on the leaves like jewels that accounts for this name. Where it grows it typically grows in profusion and finding a dense stand on a moist early morning is like stumbling across a gossamer gown adorned with thousands of round mirrored sequins. The flower's shape is what botanists call 'strongly zygomorphic', meaning that there is only one plane that can pass through the flower to create mirror images, rather than 4, 5 or more seen in many flowers. This, coupled with the bright orange-red color, makes me suspect (if I didn't already know) that this flower is hummingbird pollinated, though moths and butterflies, with their long curled sipping mouthparts, can also get at the nectar housed deep in the spurred part of the flower. It hangs on the merest thread from the plant, and in the least wind, the whole plant oscillates with orange spangles. In practical terms, the Jewel Weed, Impatiens capensis, is handy to have around. Especially early in its growth, the stem is succulent, meaning it is mostly water, and consequently, almost clear. We pick a few soft early stems and put them in the freezer for later in the summer, when we most certainly will come in contact with poison ivy, yellow jackets, and stinging nettle. It grows in exactly the same places as nettle, and when rubbed on these skin irritations, goes a long way to take the sting and itch out. Unfortunately, it does not do much good on the terrible sting I got last week from the Saddleback Caterpillers, where the stinging hairs become embedded in the skin. A third common name for the plant is worth paying attention to: Touch Me Not. It is not so named because it is in any way irritating or poisonous, but because of the behavior of its seedpods. The elongated corn-ear-shaped seed pods grow up to more than an inch long. Each consists of four long flaps that come together to make up the pod. As the pods dries and the seeds inside begin to mature, pressure builds up in the flaps, more so on the outside that the inside of each flap. Consequently, then the pods are touched by an animal (or a small child encouraged to do so by a tricky adult who knows what to expect), the pod opens explosively, ejecting its seeds a few feet away from the parent plant, thus propagating itself into new soil. A final note: the ejected seeds when mature and brown are very good to eat, tasting like tiny nuts. Our children always enjoyed being 'startled' by the exploding seeds, while catching as many of the seeds as they could, to nibble on. One time they had the idea that maybe these little mock-seeds would be good in cookies. So, we baked some cookies and substituted Jewel-nuts instead of pecans. Eaten right out of the oven, they were delicious. We gave some to our neighbor across the street. A few days later, she commented "Those cookies were mighty good, but what were those little pebbles you put in them?" Discovery: when the mock-nuts dry out again, they are hard as rocks. Ah well. At least as we can add Jewel-weed cookies now to our list of 'wild foods'. There are over 400 species world-wide in the genus Impatiens. Only two of them are indigenous to the US, and both of them grow here in the east. Jewel Weed or Touch-me-Not: by either name, it is a welcomed visitor each year. When we see it beginning to flower in profusion as it is this week, we know that it will only be another month until we will have to fire up the woodstove a time or two on a cold, early fall morning, when August wildflowers will be nothing more than a colorful memory.

If blogger ever gives me back my archives, I will add links to first parts of the Goose Creek saga.

Rat Head Stew So, I would not be bringing in a paycheck off my commision from sales of fire alarms to the poor parents of the potentially charred remains of little Bobby and little Susie. Even so, we are really very interested in moving out of my mother's basement to a place of our own (ultimately, a squalid apartment on southside Birmingham) and it would be very helpful if Fred had a job here. Once again, I let my fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages, and got a bite from the University Medical Center. Some place called the Department of Comparative Medicine. Whatever. I took the job as research technician and would be working with several Veterinarian PhD's on various projects that used animal models for human disease. Kewl! What it actually meant was that, faithful to the footsteps of those who had preceded me in my chosen field of Vertebrate Zoology, my Masters Degree qualified me to handle various kinds of animal poop while knowing the Latin name for the animal producing the deposit. Also the higher degree somehow instilled a willingness to tolerate inordinately high levels of inhaled ammonia, a by-product the breakdown of stale urine. Got to where is sorta smelled good...a true sign that I had 'made it' as a zoologist. Like the folks who live near and work at papermills say of that awful stench: Smells like money to me!. And all those nay-sayers who told me all I could do with a Masters in Zoology was shovel poop behind the elephants at the zoo were dead wrong! Much smaller poop. No heavy lifting! My chief responsibility would be with a study of trace element effects on dental caries ('cavities') prevention. Rat mommas were fed various low to high sugar diets while nursing new litters of rat pups. New born rat pups are bright pink, half the size of your thumb, and look like writhing little plugs of old-fashioned pink bubble gum. The rat pups received various trace minerals by intubation (now that is another story) to see what effect boron, strontium and so on might have on tooth developement. So, I mixed diets, cleaned cages, formulated and administered treatment doses, and generally tried to keep all the rat mommas and babies happy and properly fed or dosed toward the objective of the study, which was to determine how the trace minerals had impacted tooth developement while nursing on a high sugar diet of momma's milk. And so, when the rat pups were 40 days old, tooth development had reached the desired degree of maturity. Oops. I guess I hadn't really thought about the next step. Somehow, little rat chums, we sort of need your teeth for assay, if you don't mind. Now baby rats are cute in the way that all mammal-babies are: big-eyed, trusting, playful and innocent. I have to confess, after handling each of these little white-furry critters many times each day since birth, I was not comfortable during my instruction on the use of the Murine Cephalic Clevage Device. Yep, that's right: a guillotine. I will spare you the details. So, now I have 120 tiny rat heads, with the teeth we need to extract for the P-32 study. That requires extracting the tiny little rat molar teeth. Extraction requires heating. So, I put 120 little foil-wrapped rat heads in the autoclave, a glorified pressure cooker, for 30 minutes. Opening that autoclave when the task was done is the one thing that stands out in my mind of the 14 months I worked at this job. I opened the autoclave slowly, to let the pressure escape gradually, and out pours a cloud of rat-head-scented steam filling the room...a vapor of all my little chums I had nurtured for 40 days, until I became their executioner. Was it too late to consider a career change, I wondered? Not a good day, folks. I was never so relieved when the job came to a stopping place and I could go home where there were no rats...heads, teeth or otherwise. I began the 2 mile walk home, trying to think about anything other than the details of my day. Ah, finally, our apartment door appears. Ann has been home today and I am looking forward to a home-cooked meal. I will never forget opening the door and being overcome by the smell of hot, cooked meat. Ham, if I recall. It was overpowering, too much like the rat head stew I had just left; I almost chucked my cookies. I apologized from outside the door and without explaining other than to say "I'm sorry. We have to eat out tonight. Don't ask. I will tell you about it. Some day. Maybe. Let's go get a salad". So, I had my job. I was bringing home $7000 a year. Plenty. Soon after the rat head episode, our first child was born, and we knew we were destined to leave Birmingham for a place to the north, rural and beautiful, but without a clue as how to go about finding this place we dreamed of. Reading maps and Mother Earth News were fine for dreaming, but we were too conventional to just buy a VW bus and start driving, like many were doing in those days. We had to have a plan, a destination, and jobs would be nice. It seemed like it was going to take a miracle to deliver me from a life of perpetual animal poop. So far, all roads had ended in a cul-de-sac. Ann could find work anywhere, and I could find it nowhere. Finally, in the Fall of 1974, our angel called from Virginia, and we never looked back. We felt like we had finally arrived, when, looking back, we had only taken our first steps toward ending up here at Goose Creek.

The Night of the Killer Gnats! We are fortunate in that we are not bothered by mosquitos here on Goose Creek. We have pretty cold winters down here in the valley that kill them off, if they manage to breed in the first place, which is unlikely. The water in the creeks is cold, moving, and full of small skeeter-wriggler-eating fish, crawdads, and salamanders. Mosquitos tend to prefer still, warm water without predators...like shallow ponds and stagnant pools, old tires and buckets and what-not. What we do have here is gnats. (The one pictured here has a pin through it...that's the best kind of gnat). Gnats prefer running water for their life cycle. It takes very little running water, and that is exactly how much we have had during this parched summer. Just enough moisture for an outstanding great crop of gnats. Gnats don't sting or bite. They don't carry disease. They were born merely to aggravate, and they fill that particular niche quite well. They are weak flyers, rising and falling with the air currents. I can see them out there in the morning sun, waiting patiently for me to come out to garden every morning. With an uncanny knack for knowing when both of your hands are occupied, wet or covered with garden dirt or bean dust, these marvelously obnoxious micro-demons find exactly THAT opportunity to do their work, and their workday has begun. Goose Creek gnats have obviously been trained from birth to know the episode of Star Wars where the TIE Fighters find and enter the tiny opening of the Death Star. Fighter-gnats innately know how to make their way into their favorite orifice: the human ear. Their two-part buzz is perhaps their most aggravating feature, and they are fond of performing it from deep inside the Death Star...just far enough into the ear that a muddy finger-thrust only chases them down into the deadly Earwax Zone. Those that are assigned to battle stations outside the ear walk expertly with their tiny-tickly track shoes in such a way as to create an excruciating itch, especially, as mentioned, when hands and fingers are covered in bean dust or other gardening gradoo. Three years ago, we were working on the old house here, having the metal roof painted silver, like most of the older homes in Floyd County. It was about this time of year, as a matter of fact. The painting took a couple of days, and it really looked great, especially compared to the faded green it had been when we first saw it. I walked out to admire it one late August morning. Instead of shiny silver, the roof was dull matt gray, almost black! And fuzzy-looking, like it was covered in suede! At first I blamed the painter...a Baptist minister and part-time roof painter. I swear, you can't trust anybody to do things the right way these days! I pulled out the extension ladder and crawled up to inspect the bizarre thing that had become of our expensive paint job. What I discovered was that the roof was coated in a thick blanket of gnats! At night when the metal cools, condensation forms. When gnat babies hatch from the creek over a 2-3 day period, they do so in untold millions. At least one of those millions ended up stuck to the wet roof, unable to unstick themselves before the sun came up and baked them in place. Even a heavy rain did little to unstick gnat corpses from the roof. I had to climb up the extension ladder and wash them off with the hose sprayer... so many that they filled up the gutters, and I had to literally scoop the gnat-cadavers out into a five-gallon bucket with a garden trowel. This will be our third Hatching of the Gnats, an event that is becoming an annual celebration here on Goose Creek. I reckon I should be happy about the roof thing, and think about it as a giant Gnat Death Star that beckons millions to a timely buzzing death. If those million gnats weren't up there dead, they would all be standing in line, waiting for a shot at my ears, out in the garden, when my hands are covered in mud.

Leaving Home to Find It Ann, Nate and I made a 'spontaneous' overnight trip on Friday. Seems like we were gone for a week. Being in another world, even if it is only three hours away, does something to reset your internal frame of reference, including the cerebral timing machinery. Being in someone else's world is always unsettling to me, usually in a positive way. To hang out with a friend's friends, to travel among my former neighborhoods and the ghosts of past lives, to compare and contrast all of this against where I live and who I am now is a bit like standing the kids up against the kitchen wall to see how much they have grown since some former time, marked in pencil on the door jamb. So, on Friday, we traveled some beautiful miles to Boone, North Carolina, to attend a performance by "Dennis Stamper and Friends". Dennis and family are True Friends. He and I have known each other through some wonderful and terrible times. Music is one thing that brought us together. When he found out we were coming this weekend, he requested that Nathan be among his performing "friends" (the 'regulars' are a multi-instrumented beer-making forensic toxicologist and a spritely deep-fried southern-drawling lady lawyer). So, Friday evening, at Dennis' request, and after forgetting his lyrics twice and making an amazingly graceful recovery, Nathan sang one of our favorite songs of the many he has written. I thought it might be worthwhile to share the lyrics with you. Over Your Shoulder Lyrics and Music by Nathan First Copyright 2001 When the sunrise and sunset lie both in the east When it don't really matter what matters the least When you're dining a'lonely and you long for a feast No, don't look over your shoulder, I'll be at your feet. When the world gets so angry the sea fights the land When it grows so divided that no one can stand When all you can do is dig holes in the sand No, don't look over the ocean, I'll be in your hand. When the tools of destruction run brave and run free When you don't even know who's the known enemy When you're being the best lost and blind you can be No, don't look over the desert, I'll be at your knee. When you only have inches and must give a mile When the devil's the jury and brings you to trial When you know that your only defense is denial No, don't look all the world over, I'll be in your smile.

Typing Whilst Moving I am in the midst of a possible metamorphosis from Blogger to Moveable Type. Literally 'out of heaven' Shelagh of BlogOn somehow heard my desparate plea for server space and the chance to try Moveable Type with Training Wheels, before committing to relocating Fragments to MT. So far, so good, I guess. I have a young MT blog up and running, with some repeats from Fragments/blogger and some stuff only posted there. Soon I will be attempting to import my Fragments/blogger template into Moveable Type. Any words from the wise among you who have made this transition? I am open for any suggestions or warnings you might offer. BTW...I just posted TWO 'new' images over at the MT blog this morning. Sorry, Bene, no color over there yet. Our technical staff is working on it. Thanks for the help, Shelagh!

Other Voices I am not above snipping and posting. I generally don't. Today we are traveling out of town, and my mind is more occupied with finding socks than with finding (what loosely passes for) the right words here at Fragments. And, as seems to be the cycle, I am looking back over the last week's postings. My responses, looking at them with the eye of an 'outsider' varies from "Oh, that was worth saying, if not said very well" to "this guy should be locked up" or "can we put this weblog on SpamGuard?" It has been a crazy week. For those who expressed their concerns after all the 'cloud poodle' stuff this week, I am back on my medications (wink). Here are a few odds and ends from places I have been lately. From A Small Victory [...] I miss that stuff. I miss seeing the ice cream man as a huge treat rather than a huge burden on my wallet. I miss seeing the pool as an escape from the heat rather than a danger to every small child in the yard. I miss the yells of "tag, you're it!" and the days we would spend on our bicycles making lefts and rights and rights and lefts, trying hard to see if we could get lost in our own neighborhood [...] From Northwest Notes: [...] I left the sandals at the very edge of the water and waded in. It was shaded by trees and overgrown shrubs and was just slightly cool. I can hardly remember the last time I was in the water before today. Timidly, I swam out a short distance, into the sun. I couldn’t see the bottom—only the tall, hairy weeds that neared the surface. So I didn’t know how quickly the water would get deep. When I couldn’t touch bottom, I swam back and started over. Once I got used to the weeds touching me, they didn’t bother me [...] From Dieoff.org, reached via Rebecca's Pocket: [...] Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. … the past clarifies potential paths to the future. One often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the "crash" that many fear -- a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the "soft landing" that many people hope for - a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology. -– Joseph A. Tainter And from Redwood Dragon: [...] Citing teachings dating back to the Second Vatican Council, and statements by Pope John Paul II throughout his papacy, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops declared unequivocally that the biblical covenant between Jews and God is valid and therefore Jews do not need to be saved through faith in Jesus.[...]

Pain Hurts It's a case of 'physician heal thyself'. A physical therapist shouldn't admit that he has back pain, I suppose. Now, there is back pain and there is back pain. I have had both. What I have right now is the lesser of the two: myofascial pain. Not life threatening or severly debilitating. Just a pure-dee aggravation, is all. Most any time I twist at the trunk while leaning, (as in hoeing in the garden this morning...bad body mechanics! you ought to know better!) or use my arms in an awkward posture (like today, sitting side-saddle on a step, reaching up to use the sander on the riser two steps higher, until all the steps were sanded), I get a ropy, knotty, painful trigger point in a muscle. This one tonight is under my shoulder blade. Some of you probably get the same results from too much hunkering behind the computer screen. Faulty posture is a frequent cause for myofascial pain. The reason I mention this is to tell you about a neat tool that helps inactivate active muscle trigger points, the point-tender sore places that almost everybody experiences. It is so simple and I can't say how many times I have given myself a good dope-slap for not inventing this thing myself. It is called a TheraCane. Basically, it just provides a way to administer deep pressure to a trigger point. This compression can inactive the point and keep the pain condition from escalating. Many trigger points are in the upper and lower back. The curved cane lets you reach those spots and apply firm pressure to the painful areas. It is very effective, not expensive, unbreakable and safe to use. Pain hurts. I try to avoid it whenever possible. There are some good physical methods for treating muscle pain that don't require medications. The TheraCane is one of them. I will be keeping mine close by for a while.

Showers of Blessing This morning I trudged around in the garden, as if walking in a cemetery. The corn like standing brown and curled sarcophagous scarecrows made rustling noises of November leaves in the dry winds. Half-ripe Hubbards shaped like rounded sand-colored cellos lay shrowed by squash leaves drooped and lifeless. The squash were not quite ripe enough to pick but so close it seemed cruel to pull them up, even though the vines would die in one or two more days of this unending drought. It is time to plant fall greens...kale, collards, turnip and mustard greens. But hoeing a row just made a dust devil that chased me around for a while, as I walked about, reading the tombstones of one vegetable, then the next. The remaining water in buckets and barrels, filled from the last of the creek water from the deep hole near the barn, I poured around the Buttercrunch that should be transplanted soon, but why bother. Today, the last of the isolated pools in the creek dried up, and the shiners and darters, the beautiful Northern Red Bellied Dace...all are lifeless pale flotsam on a grave of mud. The clouds spoke of rain since mid-morning, but only in a distant whisper, and in jest. Nothing at all appeared on the weather radar that I watch like an ancient shaman watches bird entrails for signs of what might be. Once again, we were taunted with the hope of rain. Oh how those first drops would seem miraculous, the ordinary become extraordinary, sacred and hallowed, if only they would come. Soon. And then they came. Three large, fat drops on the pavers outside the porch door. Then nothing, only a high hot wind. I lay down on the walk and watched the clouds form demons and cherubs, but a gray, flat, featureless raincloud would have been the most beautiful cloud of all. So intent on the vision overhead, I had not heard the first hints of rustling down our valley to the south. Wind? Rain? Both? Sudden, sustained and smelling of dust and ozone, the blessed rains swept in sheets down the valley. It is raining still. This afternoon, we have walked in it, waded in it, rejoiced in it. How frail we are in that the cellular seas within us, plant and animal alike, are filled by rains and rivers that we do not own and cannot invoke by a word or a law. We live on a Water Planet, but it is all too easy to take this miraculous liquid for granted. I hope that I never will again.

Revelation in the Clouds The results are back after exhaustive testing by the Shroud of Turin Forensics Team, and here are the conclusions regarding the TRUE vision inscripted in the cloud: Obviously, what you are seeing here (as outlined by our expert technicians to facilitate your grasp of this arcane apparition) is a regally pampered and immaculately groomed, rather small Poodledog Princess, lying on its side (facing left of image), expectantly, on an affordable, adjustable deluxe Craftmatic Dog Bed at firmness setting 4. Most significantly, our experts, by means of highly-technical graphics enhancement techniques, have revealed a part of the image that was initially just out of view to left of image, showing the Finger of the Hand of God approaching, poised to tickle the Royal Belly of the Heavenly Poodle. I think you will agree, this is life-altering. I may start my own denomination. This is the true vision of the clouds. And now you know the answer to LIFE, THE UNIVERSE and EVERYTHING! Kehaar, you were close!

Oh Death, Where is Thy Sting? I'm sorry. I said I would stop with the garden pictures. I can't help myself. I'm out of control. I admit it. I mentioned last night that I had tangled with some bad critters...these Saddleback Caterpillars are all over the corn! I gave you a link to go see them, and a few more venomous caterpillars. But no, I'm not content to let my readers go look at somebody else's photos from some inferior garden other than ours here on (what used to be) Goose Creek (before the current drought). I am serious here, folks. Get to know this one. Do not pet. Check out those needle-like hairs both fore and aft on this seductively beautiful larva. They break off in your skin. They are poison tipped. Bactine doesn't do squat to put out the fire. I have seen it recommended to cover the stung area with adhesive tape, and pull off the tape in hopes of pulling out the almost microscopic stinging hairs. Cussing loudly also seems to help. Now, if you have somebody that you really want to ruin their day, a half-dozen of these inside a baseball cap might just do the trick. You didn't hear it from me!

Its Clouds Illusions We Recall Well, dedicated readers and hallucinating browsers who thought they were clicking on the Baba Ram Dass page and instead viewed the cloud picture: The deadline for entries has passed. I have compiled the answers of the 1 in 50 viewers who were brave enough, or in a sufficiently altered state of consciousness, to offer their visions for the Cloud Rorschach offered here a couple of days ago. . Final judgement regarding the TRUE MEANING of the cloud image will be posted tomorrow. I think it's the Apotheosis of the Michelin Man, painted on an 18th-century Viennese ceiling. The cherubs and pegasus-chariots and the Empress Maria Theresa (smiling, clutching a wreath of laurel to her bosom)are just outside of the frame to the left. Barbara of Pinniped This is some kind of sneaky Rorschach, isn't it?! I see a crazed Michelin man, mouth open in an angry roar, leaning forward with his right arm extended... to do what? Who knows. susanna cornett of Cut on the Bias I see a man drowning, trying to keep his head above water. (She wonders if it might not be O. Bin Laden, hiding up there). Michelle It is a dalmation puppy on his back, in a vice. (The head is the roundish greyer part at the top.) Ol' buddy, Dennis Stamper I see a large curly haired dog with a pronounced brow that shades its eyes, a large bulbous nose perched above an open mouth which holds an invisible regulator because it is certain this dog is scuba diving (tank at upper right) I also see .. if you take the dog, it's nose becomes a young lad along with his sister to his right, on a magical journey on the open-mouthed flying clam they are lying upon. The sister has one leg kicked up and points at something below, or perhaps at the mouth of the clam. Maybe it had an itch. If you want to make it sinister, the children are unaware of the beast whose bulky paws hover right behind them, and whose beaked head looms above. The forementioned scuba tank/monster also looks like Gonzo the Great. Jen the Imaginative (who left no forwarding address but may be out grazing among the funny mushrooms somewhere in a Texas pasture, under high puffy clouds). I see a big curmudgeon, but what I notice the most is how much the picture looks like an illustration by Howard Pyle or N.C. Wyeth. Possumblog Terry, The Esteemed and Philosophical, Pensive and Erudite Chief of the Pouched Mammals. A roasted marshmallow ready to be eaten. Kevin McGehee Without having read the comments from others, I took one look at this picture and saw the exact same thing as susanna...a malevolent cloud-god staring down and to the left with a look of fury and wrath. Yikes!!! Curt the Curteous from Hotlanta I saw the figure of God reaching out to man from the Sistine Chapel. Kehaar/Sifllay Hraka A de-horned Minotaur, sitting at a small circular table, conversing with an owl perched on an overturned napkin dispenser. Bigwig/Siflay Hraka I see a herd of cats in Fez's. Bene Diction Blogs On I have to say, I've looked at life from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow, I really don't know clouds, at all. But I do know that, in spite of your deep meditative states while considering the message in the cloud image, no one got it exactly right. I am very sorry. I was there. I saw the whole thing in context. I know The Truth! Of course there is always room for error. Consequently, I have handed the photo over to our forensics laboratory for substantiation of authenticity and confirmation of my conclusions regarding what is the REAL meaning of the creatures in the clouds. The judges decision will be posted tomorrow morning. Thanks to all who participated. Your answers have totally warped my poor sheltered brain, and I will never be able to look at napkin dispenser, Michelin tires, clams or Gonzo the Great in the same way, ever, ever again.

Goose Creek: Fred Launches His Career In the way of a quick rehash, I am taking the long-winded path toward telling how we got to GooseCreek, from whence this epistle is being written and from whence my old bones will be carried some decades hence, Lord willing. In the past episode, Ann and I are marking time in Birmingham, Alabama...my home town...until we can 'find and buy our place in the country'. In our minds, we have already left. Meanwhile, baby needs shoes... We are living, 'temporarily' with my mother. I have no job and no income. My wife (who found work in the first 30 minutes in town as a pharmacist) is severely pregnant, and expecting in 4 months, which will also mark an end to the income, at least for a while. The job market in my area is saturated, the economy is stagnant or worse, with the 'Arab Oil Embargo' of the early 70's sending gas prices out the roof. So...off to the classified ads. This, I am convinced, is going to be humbling. "Salesmen needed. On commission. Training provided. Limited openings" Oh, this seemed promising. Turns out that I would be selling fire alarms, door to door. Training consisted of one 45 minute session where I was instructed in the pitch and provided with my 'kit'. The kit consisted of a cheap briefcase containing a cheap tape recored that played a canned program of background music in a minor key, and a laminated flip book. The flip book consisted of pictures of various disastrous home fires, complete with pictures of the victims in various states of bar-be-qued repose, some more or less still alive after the fire, but pitifully bandaged and miserable. My initial task: find a victim, arrange an "educational opportunity", attend the session with the clients, call the supervisor from the victims home so that he can deliver the highly polished version of the pitch, once the shoeleather salesperson (me) has foot in the door. Oh crap. This is going to be humbling. I watch myself going through the motions in a kind of out-of-body experience. Fred rings doorbell of formerly friendly neighbors. He greets Mr. and Mrs. Anderson with half apologies, while trying to give off vapors of confidence, conviction and zeal. Finally after some small talk, he sits down and begins his first maneuver toward future wealth and financial security. Lots of biology majors across the country are probably doing exactly the same thing right this minute, he thought... a thought that provided little in the way of encouragement. Start tape. Canned documentary music begins and melliflous NPR announcer voice recites the statistics of home fires, damages in dollars to the average home owner, insurance red tape, and of course it alludes to 'the horrible prospect of personal injury'. Here the brief introduction ends, and it is now time for the shoeleather salesperson, Fred, to begin the 'face to face' portion of the educational opportunity. (Open glossy laminated flip book while minor-key music continues a low volume in the background, for emotional impact). The hapless salesman begins: (Turn first pages of flip book slowly, where Mr. and Mrs. Anderson can see...like one would do when reading a picture book to very small children). "Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, you have a wonderful home here. You have worked hard and you should be able to sleep peacefully through the night without concern about losing everything that is dear to you." (Flip a few more pages, looking very solemn, pause through a moment of pregnant silence before continuing). "Mr. and Mrs. Anderson (salesman is instructed to use client names repeatedly ad nauseum): The charred body of this child in the body bag here could be any one of you". At that moment of intense personal integrity-crisis, Fred returned to his body from the ceiling where he had been watching this disgusting, and oh-so-demeaning experience. "I'm sorry folks. That's about all of this I can go through. I apologize for taking your time tonight. I can't go through with this." At about that time, the phone range. The homeowner answered; it was my supervisor and I asked to speak to him. He asked how it was going. "Oh it is going fine. It is going great. My kit is going back where it came from and I am going to get a real job and I am going to stop payment on the check for my death-by-cremation kit. And I'm gone." And I hung up. Oh, that felt good. And what a relief! The next day, I took the kit in the briefcase to the home office of the Firemongers Company, opened the front door, and I launched that package as far down the front hallway as I could fling it. I promptly went home and began my job search all over again, starting in the Yellow Pages under Laboratories: AACME, ABCO.... and two months later, I was making Rat Head Stew. But that will have to wait until the next educational opportunity here at Fragments. Stay tuned.

YadaYadaYada Fran up (over? up and over?) at Northwest Notes has been on another outting to some REAL mountains, and she was packing the digital. Nice shots, wonderful Earth! Possumblog, Silflay Hraka, and Cut on the Bias have pointed their readers to the Cloud Rorschach Test. Entries are trickling in. Tension is mounting. Who will have THE ANSWER to LIFE, the UNIVERSE, and EVERYTHING? (and if you know that it's 42, don't tell). Greetings to Eleanor, who does a wonderful work at Mossbern Animal Rescue Centre where "we rescue misused, abused, unwanted and neglected animals, and provide therapeutic work placements for children and adults with problems. Our aim is to enhance the lives of both people and animals through our work". She visits Fragments from near Glasgow...a most wonderful area we were pleased to visit last year in our brief travels to Ireland and Scotland. And, in spite of myself, another garden tip: Don't pet the pretty little caterpillars on the corn. The Saddleback Caterpillar is one of several stinging caterpillars pictured on this page. I discovered quite a few of them in the garden tonight by wearing shorts while weeding the corn. Very painful. Bad dudes. Show your kids these pictures and avoid some serious discomfort.

Planet Helianthus And so another summer garden draws prematurely to an end, going out with a dry-throated gasp and a dusty wimper, dehydrated from the ongoing drought, looking a bit like a shrunken head. It sure was love while it lasted. This Sunflower picture, then, is symbolic of the end of things...summer's last hurrah, and probably the last in a string of 'bug cameos' from the garden. Of all the various insect images this summer, this one was hardest to capture, and least like what I had envisioned, not that the average casual viewer much cares for the technical considerations behind an image. I'll burden you with it, anyway. Strongly backlit in the mid-afternoon sun, the ray flowers (yellow-petalled edges of the flower) were strikingly brilliant. The disk flowers (the parts that turn into edible sunflower seeds) were being swarmed by at least a dozen bumblebees that looked like so many carnival bumper-cars as they coursed over the flower, as it bobbed in and out of focus, in the breeze. (You DID know that members of the aster or sunflower family have 'composite' inflorescences, consisting of disk flowers and ray flowers, didn't you?) So, a passer-by (of which we have a half-dozen, daily) would have seen a tall man standing on a 5-gallon plastic bucket in the corn, under an 8-foot sunflower, holding his cap in one outstretched hand (to keep glare off the lens), the camera in the other, up precariously close to a dozen bumblers, while teetering, sweating and cussing quietly to himself, and of course, to the bees. Creative dilemma: expose for the rays which are in blinding sun. This throws the central part of the flower 2-3 stops underexposed, dark and without detail. Or, expose for the disk flowers and the bees, which, as you see here, puts the ray flowers into extreme overexposure, to the point of disappearing...as if the entire flower exists floating, unfixed and fading off into the ethers. Rather like the disk of the sun, sending out cosmic yellow petals into the depths of space. (a bit too saccharine, hmmm?) It is an odd effect, but, seeing as it probably represents the temporary end of an era here on Goose Creek, I offer it to you as a garden's goodbye, and am already looking forward to next year's plantings, pictures, and vegetable-punditry. I hope you'll come back and see us for the next summer's crop.

Eureka! Almost to the first crest on the MT learning curve. I have posted an image, just now, that you might like to see. Go here. Then come back.

Strawberry Fields Forever We won't even worry with all the supposed reasons they are now called "strawberries". Nobody really seems to know for sure. What we do know is that what you may have eaten on your cereal this morning is NOT the same fruit that William Bartram found in spreading acres on his horseback travels through the southern mountains more than two hundred years ago. Then, his horse's legs were red from riding through miles of berries. They grow over on our pasture road, but are few in number, disappointingly small, and the turkeys almost always find them the day they reach their sweetest state...the day that we had said "lets go pick the wild strawberries today". Like Bartram, the original red berries were 'pioneers', colonizing bare ground that had been burned. Burning, either by Native Americans in their efforts to increase browse for game animals, or resulting from lightning, were common across the southeast, leaving vast areas empty of vegetation. The 'scarlet berry', as it was called, thrived as an early colonizer, and spread readily. The first settlers here quickly discovered its sweet taste and fragrant smell. Strawberry fields, strawberry plains (names still present in the south) lured Sunday picknikers to pick gallons of scarlet berries....no minor effort as the native berries were much smaller than those we purchase today in the grocery stores. Another similar species from the Pacific coast called the Chili Berry produces large, pale berries of poor taste. Both plants eventually ended up in a European gardens, where anything from the New Country was eagerly cultivated. In one particular garden in the Netherlands, both the chili berry and the scarlet berry were planted close together. Enough similar that one was able to accept pollen from the other, a hybrid was formed, with the best qualities of each: large, hardy, scarlet and sweet. I hate to even confess that the 'strawberries' I had this morning came out of the cereal box, flat and felt-like, molded berry-looking things that tasted of red kool-aide and were called 'strawberry bits'. My apologies to the scarlet berry and its kin. And Mr. Bartram, you're not missing anything.

Now Where is That Walking Stick? I am trudging up the steepest part of the learning curve, having finally gotten my nerve up to try Moveable Type. So far, relatively painless, but steep climbing, and my old knees aren't doing so great. Will reach the top of the climb in, oh, a couple of months, maybe before winter sets in. Come visit me over at my temporary campsite. Bring band-aids.

Cloud Watching, Day Dreaming Cloud watching must have been one of the earliest forms of human entertainment. Free. Widely available. While the mind wanders, they drift silently overhead, lofty and unreachable, boiling, evanescent, solid-seeming then vanishing in a wisp of vapor. Clouds present the eye with shapes and forms seen through the lens of imagination and wimsy. What do you see in these clouds that I photographed from the jet window, a year ago today? Cloud creatures can range from the sublime to the ridiculous (and we can already guess a few bloggers with potential for imaginations on steroids). One hyper-imaginative reader (and you know who you are) in a recently posted cloud picture here on Fragments sees "a sheep dog, but in particular, Ruff, Dennis the Menace's dog, with a corncob pipe in his mouth, holding his head at a jaunty MacArthuresque angle". Come on. Post a comment or email, tell what you see. Can't be any crazier than McArthur, the sheep dog. I'll compile responses and post them Wednesday evening. Might be interesting.

Perseids! Come to our pasture. Bring lawn chairs. Darkness will be provided. Normally, the best time to observe the Perseids would be from 1-4 am during the morning of August 12. However, in 2002 things are a little different. Two maxima are expected: One around 22:00 Universal Time on August 12 and one around 8:00 UT on August 13. For those on the East Coast of the United States, these times correspond to 6 pm (August 12) and 4 am (August 13) Eastern Daylight Savings Time. For those in North American, the best time to watch is the Tuesday morning of August 13 (after midnight of Monday, August 12). If you do not want to get up so early, we suggest that you view the Perseids in the evening of Monday, August 12. More at Space.com Watch those necks, folks. Say, here's my card. You just might need some physical therapy on the neck and shoulders... Update Monday morning: Set the alarm for 4 a.m., finally stumbled down the steps in the dark at 4:45. Before my feet hit the walkway, a stunning meteor with a persistent tail streaked southwest, over the barn. Then the fog settled in the valley and the show was over. Will I get up again at 4:00 tomorrow morning? Probably. Last chance until next year, folks!

Here is another in the series of grampa tales. Average dwell-time at Fragments, according to Site Meter, is 2 min 11 seconds. That should get you into the 4th or 5th paragraph. At that point, sound-biters can just cruise on down the page to the next short chunk of word-hash. You get some fresh vegetables from the garden, emailed as an attachment, if you make it all the way to the end. Write for details.

Spare the Rod As I have confessed in these pages before, I chose to find something I like, and hold on to it. Let these posessions become worn with age, soft, worn, familiar..the older the better: this goes for old shoes, ancient shirts, favorite camping gear...and my good hiking stick. I have had my old staff now for more than fifteen years, after taking it from a favorite red cedar that the phone company saw fit to cut down from the edge of our farm. Damn near lost it, once. I was invited to go with the 'old farts club' on a hike down southwest of Brevard, on a stretch of something called the Horsepasture River. Wow, never heard of it, but that sounded idyllic, placid, about what I was up to...a leisurely ramble along the banks of meandering river. Sure, count me in. We gathered at the trip leader, Bob's, house early on Friday morning. There were maybe ten of us, the youngest a 10 year old boy, and the oldest, old Harper who was 70 at the time. All the more reason to expect a nice, slow-paced, gentle rise and fall among the grazing horses along the river. Ah, bliss. I suppose I should have done my homework. This was before the day of easy internet access to topo maps and trail information. I just assumed Bob Benner, old Bushwack, had taken our age spread, and also the general gluteal spread of most of the group, into consideration when planning this trip location. It turns out that the Horsepasture, in its course south, drops some 1200 feet in less than three miles of river, coursing through some of the most magnificent, if precipitous and unmarked, country in the south, and now I learn, in the guidebooks, is described as "treacherous and obscure". . The first several miles of the trail is thick with waterfalls that can only be reached on foot, and with care. Then the going gets serious. We were planning on hiking about 12 miles through the area, starting Friday afternoon, and getting back to the cars by mid-day on Sunday. After seeing the Rainbow Falls in the first mile or so, I was sure this was going to be a memorable trip. I had no idea how memorable. The trail taken by dayhikers ends in about three miles. Most people with good sense turn around and go back to their cars at this point. We followed blindly behind tripleader Bob, the authority on all things wilderness, the author of books on hiking and canoeing...trust him, he said. He had a map. To summarize 48 hours of agony: We attempted to cut cross country to pick up a river trail that crossed to the other side of the river, somewhere down there. Maybe five times, we plunged down a ravine toward the creek to find that dangerously steep bluffs would keep us from getting to the river, and we were NOT where we thought we were. We, all of us, 10 yr old and 70 yr old and all bigbutts in-between, had to literally pull our way back up to the rim of the gorge, pushing our backpacks ahead of us through the Rhododendron, and start all over again at the next ravine. By dark, we were exhausted, grumbling, openly mutinous, with some of us ready to break ranks and backtrack our way back to the starting point to spend the night on the roadside. Again, from information now available: "For the weak of heart or sensible among you, if you had chosen the left fork back at the "Flats", climbed the mountain to a closed access road on the ridge and turned right, then turned right again after 100yds onto an old logging road blocked by a huge rock and continued on until reaching a steep downhill track you would have arrived here after 2 miles on reasonable trails". We were not sensible. We were tough hiker dudes. I do not remember anything beautiful for the rest of the trip. We did manage to find some landmarks that were definitely on the map, and by 5:00 Sunday, we were where we were supposed to have camped Saturday night, near the tip of a finger of Lake Jocassee. We had told our spouses we would be home for Sunday supper. All of us were battle-weary, and Charlie was having severe hip pains, so he and I stayed on the banks of the lake, while everyone else faced an 11 mile, uphill hike in the dark, not expecting to get to the cars until very late that night. We hoped they would remember to send someone for us the next morning by boat to haul us out. As Charlie and I ate into the third day rations of what was have been a two day trip, some late-afternoon fishermen were startled to discover us camped on the remote, wooded lakeside, just before dark. We told them our situation, and asked them to report our situation to the rangers at lake headquarters. They seemed extremely indifferent to our plight, and we figured we had wasted our breath; Jocassee is a massive lake, and these yokels may have put in 10 miles from the park office. But well after dark, we saw a boat with a bright searchlight working their way cautiously down the shallow slough. The Park Rangers had found us, and we happily boarded the pontoon boat for the 45 minute ride back to the park office in the cool, wet night air. After we reached the unbelievable comfort of the headquarters office and were preparing to bed down in the luxury of the off-season cabin we were offered , the ranger got a phone call that 'some fellas showed up after being lost and late getting back to their cars'. It was our group. We were suprised they had made it out so soon, it must have been a forced march indeed. Sorry we misset it. Charlie and I called a few strategic wives to call all the rest and tell them that we were all safe, and would be home around 2:00 a.m. I didn't realize it until a couple of days later, but I had not gotten home with my hiking stick. I knew I had it when we got on the boat. So I called the park office, asked if they had found it in their office there. Nope, not a trace, but they would keep an eye out for it. Yeah, right. About a month later, I got a call from Lake Jocassee Park office. They found my stick behind the seats on the pontoon boat, and would keep it for me, just come when I could. Wife and me made the five-hour trip down, about 2 months later, and brought the old staff back home. That was eight years ago. It stands over in the corner now, just as you go out the back door. I use it almost every day. It may not look like much, but by gosh, it's full of memories, worn slick from hours of happy peregrination across God's green land, this rod and staff, it comforts me, and I plan to hold on to it for another little bit.

Mr. Twigs, the Walking Stick BeneDiction has placed a challenge at the feeble feet of Fragments. Other Guys, you have had fair warning in BD's post this morning: More bloggers neat bug pictures: Barlowe Farms has a close up of a praying mantis staring right at the camera. I found it one of the most facinating creatures in the woods when I was a kid, and would go out of my way to find them. I liked having a mantis crawling up my arm, they tickled. So, a challenge to Barlow Farms and Fragments from Floyd. Can you guys get a picture a walking stick? And as you can see above, I have produced the desired picture without delay. Meet Mr. Twigs, the walking stick. This little guy we starting raising from a mere splinter, after finding him, injured and afraid, hiding near our compost pile almost 15 years ago. Here is one of his baby pictures. Fran at Northwest Notes also has a pet walking stick that looks much like young Mr. Twigs. He came to trust us and enjoy our company. He was always a healthy eater, and continued to grow in length, but never was able to put on much through the shoulders. Eventually, he became a wiry 6-footer, a veritable bean pole of a walking stick, under our loving care and encouragement. Eventually Mr. Twigs died, leaving behind his stout central exoskeleton that you see here. I never leave home without him. And somehow, I feel like the little fella knows that he is still our favorite walking stick.

Off the Top of My Head :: Here are a few words from Rebecca Blood in a recent interview in the Sacramento Bee. Again, thanks to Rebecca for sending lots of nice folks to Fragments from all over the world. It has been good to hear from those of you who have emailed or commented, and you have broadened my blogging world by showing me to your sites for a tour. :: By far the coolest tool I ran across visiting other weblogs this week was GeoButton. With a simple script insertion into my Blogger template, I am now able to know city, state and country for viewers to Fragments. This makes my isolated little hunk of space here seem more connected to people in real places in the larger world, and that's a good thing. Welcome, guests from Tel Aviv, The Hague, and a town in Norway that can't be spelled on the Earthling keyboard. :: Once again, we are in the weekend visit slump. Is it possible to believe that the community of bloggers en masse have made the personal choice to refrain from tending their weblogs on the weekend, so they can spend quality time with spouses, children, friends...NAH! I am more certain than ever that most bloggers must do their weblogging from work. Am I right? I mean, who would spend their own at-home, personal time writing about tomato horn worms and dog behavior? :: The gauntlet is thrown. Bene Diction has placed the challenge for the best picture of a "Walking Stick". Barlowe Farms, give it your best shot. :: Just got buzzed by a hummingbird in the garden, while watering our poor, thirsty tomato plants. I didn't know h'birds came to tomatos! Natch. It was enticed by the orange nylon baling twine I use to tie up the plants. Sorry Charlie, no nectar there. And on the topic of disappointment: for the Google searcher hunting for "teen +son +big +feet +growing +shoe +size", I don't think I have a recent essay on that subject, but will give it some thought. Check back soon. :: I wish I had a reason to use backgrounds, just so I could play around with these stunning permutations of light, color and texture over at Pinnaped. This is a rich site, go planning to spend at least an hour wandering around; then bookmark it for later. :: Early morning discovery: Mild mannered Buster had a bit of a side-dish with breakfast this morning....POSSUM. And it weren't playing. Not dead all the way, but it has not crawled out of the back of the truck yet. I am looking for a shoebox, so I can mail it to Trussville for a proper burial.

REUNION August 2001 A year ago today, I flew home, like a Lost Boy, to my 35th high school reunion. For those of you old enough to share this experience, and especially for those who have moved far away from the home of your school years, you might appreciate the significance of this event for me...enough to inspire an attempt a poetry, and I should know better. The cabin pitched left as we banked to avoid The next in a series of towering moist masses Of earth’s warm breath, cloud mountains Flat topped, I thought like Jack, I could step out And be in a land above reality, beyond time Where there are giants, singing harps And poor boys become rich from magic beans And never have to grow up. Belly rushes as the cloud-tops like a floor just below us Opened in a chasm plunging thirty thousand feet To checkered patterns in unknown pastures. The camera takes light, making a digital memory of images of billows and caves And I am flying in my heart where I first saw Peter Wendy and Tinkerbelle Swoop and dive with arched backs in pure freedom, going home. It has never left me, and I have never found it In time we drop below the clouds, to another reality. Soon I will revisit my roots A Lost Boy reunited with the past, an amnesiac stepping out of a time machine. Somehow we have reappeared, briefly, from and in various states with a hope for reunion, back here in our home town, adult images of our children-selves, more now like our grandparents. I survey the crowd of painfully half-familiar faces in elation and panic. What do I say to these morphed images of former classmates? Should I even hint to any of these others how I have been altered by separate times since we shared together the British Invasion, Viet Nam, a dead president, men on the moon? Why have we come here? What are we hoping to find? I watch a hundred familiar strangers seeking some sign in each others eyes Handshakes back-slaps hugs, like ants rubbing antennae for the scent of recognition. the eyes are concealed by missing decades and we are almost anonymous, and yet These people somehow belong to me, random cohorts of time and chance struggling to bridge the isolation of ages in brief flash of contact We share only as much of our selves as can fit on the back of a business card It is strangely alien and familiar here “home” among “friends”. Were we united in those days by more than the school colors, the fight song? Can we possibly find here a re-union or at least an ambiguous truce between the memories of the child we were and the realities of the adult we have become? It cannot be permanence or continuity we expect to find by coming here. Nothing is the same. If buildings or neighborhoods still stand they are smaller and bleaker Than our memories of immensity and brilliance and expectation. Maybe it is enough, though, to have revisited the alleys we walked and To have called each other by nicknames we have not heard in 30 years And to know that, once upon a time, we were made alive and shared together the ghost of that age, the spirit of those times that were severly ours And we are all the same, at least in that way, forever. I needed to know this, and so I came. Then my flight away from this past age lifts up Into the gray fog and drizzle over Alabama, rising perceptibly as if lifted by a giant hand through a white featureless opacity that seems to go on forever and I wonder who I am, in this nether world between earth and sky, past and present. The mist brightens and begins to tatter, color comes back in imperceptible blues and yellows Once again, I live in the world of light above the clouds That exists always, like the past, beyond and without need of my awareness, and as real As my ant-like existence down there, all these years, Under fog that obscures that world from this. I am high, in Never-never Land, and am tempted to take more pictures of it, but do not. I have enough zeros and ones, memories and meaning, Enough cloud images and illusions of things solid and firm to know Both worlds are real, and I have left and returned to my place in both of them.

"Every drought ends with a good rain" The cool breezes and early autumn sunshine are welcomed today, a respite from the unrelenting heat of summer. But the wind and sun also are the enemy, carrying away what little moisture is left in the pasture grasses, gardens and creeks. More than that, even the underground rivers and caverns that vent to the surface, forming the heads of mountain streams like Goose Creek over there between the house and barn, are silently ceasing to flow. More water has risen from tree and soil to the thin clouds overhead than has fallen from sky to earth during the past three months. No current moves the surface of the creek, though the minnows, now in high-density housing, are stirring the waters in a clostrophobic struggle to eek specks of food from what little water remains in the isolated, shallow depressions here and there along the creekbed. We are in the midst of a drought. There is a tendency to take this dry, parched weather personally, so we are trying to keep the cycles of nature in perspective. Our valley was formed as a tiny water-carved scar on the side of the later stages in the wearing down of the ancient Appalachian mountain core, some billion years ago when land masses collided, lifting up a massive bulge of fire-born and hardened rock. It is difficult to conceive now that these green and gentle mountains began as a rocky dome higher and more craggy and hostile than today's Rockies. Millenia like nanoseconds end to end, of water in unbelievable floods have worn away the old rock, sand grain at at time, and carried our mountains down to become beach sand and delta soil, leaving soft and rounded, green, moist and water-worn remants of their former high magnificence. One has only to dig down a bit over by the barn to know that rounded river rocks by the tens of thousands have been washed down the narrow Rhododendron-shrouded gorge of the nameless creek that flows together with Goose Creek not 100 feet from where I sit. This same creek, tumbling down from its springfed source, has meandered first against the resistant rock of the east ridge of our valley, then the west, then back again, each time widening our little pasture by imperceptible inches in 100 years...such an unthinkably long time to our mortal perspective, a flash of time in a million years of wind and sun, frost and floods. Floods are cataclysmic, sudden, drastic and evident in their consequences. Drought is chronic, insidious, draining life invisibly, quietly, leaving no record in the sands of geology's time. It is an abundance of water that has carved the hollow of the creekbed and made valley wide, not its absence. It is an abundance of water that has nurtured the broadleaved forest of these mountain hillsides. Drought has not formed this landscape, and it seems reasonable to hope that it will not subdue it now. We will miss the rains for a few more weeks, for maybe one more season. But we must learn to see the cycles of wet and dry as the land sees it, and be still. If history is any lesson, the water will win the day.

Blogging as an Aid in Alzheimers Reading this article, I understand now that this blog is helping to sustain my sanity here in my Silver Years, and is staving off the looming dementia that may await just over the hill. I appreciate your taking time to read my account of where I put my car keys, and reminders to empty the cat box. Thank you for coming to visit me at Figments of Freud (WI).

The Resplendent Common Millipede All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all. Each little flower that opens, each little bird that sings, he made their glowing colors, he made their tiny wings. He gave us eyes to see them, and lips that we might tell how great is God Almighty, who has made all things well. -- Cecil Frances Alexander, 1848

Recent footprints among the fragments *Dave Trowbridge of Redwood Dragon has allowed my conjecture that Black Labs have the 'best disposition among large dogs' but offers De canibus non est disputandum, but although I never met a Black Lab I didn't like, I prefer the temperament of a good, solid, German-line GSD. Aloof confidence married to incredible intensity is probably the best way to put what I find attractive in them. Aloof confidence married to incredible intensity: I thought that was the description on the label on a bottle of Peach Ripple. *And, great huge surprise: Bigwig of Silflay Hraka is seeing things in the cloud picture. I don't know about anyone else, but to me that looks like a cartoon English sheepdog, smoking a pipe and chasing a TIE fighter After this comment, I had this brief notion to find a Rorschach series for Bigwig, with the perverse thought of posting his results here on Fragments. But then there are some things better left unexplored, don't you agree? Even so, I may post another CLOUD picture and see what kind of airy-ethereal and mind-twisting creatures my blog visitors see in it. Hmmm. Always wanted to be a psychologist: That is very interesting. Why did you say that? Tell me about your mother. That will be two hundred dollars. *And....we appreciated the hello from Dave Smith of Balmy Northern Florida who comes to Fragments for the vicarious cool breezes; happy that he has added us to his daily list! * Late Breaking Addition: We are happy to welcome fellow photographer and Friend to the Outdoors, Fran who manages Northwest Notes, to the Fragments family. She comments that "Reading your online journal is like drinking fresh cold spring water for me". Well shucks, Fran, drink all you want, just be careful 'cause there are salamanders in the springbox. * I am just plain tickled to learn of Pinniped, the oeuvre of Barbara W, a site worthy of some perusal, and also reading with care. Fragments is among an august short list of sites she links to, and I am sure this must be a mistake, but where would we be without mutations, folks!? Barbara notes its not just me who wonders where are the butterflies?

Clouds and conifers ~ Grayson Highlands ~ Grayson County, Virginia ~ Wednesday 7 August 2002 [...] "This week, or the next, I will exclaim "that is a Fall sky!" The round piled and billowed clouds of summer for a day or two will give way to clouds streaked and smeared, thin, high and attenuated with the ends turned up, against a turquoise sky". In Praise of August ~ Fragments ~ 01 August 2002

Bugs, Barns and Blooms Well, er, Rebecca...I think it is more the garden doing the attracting than the barn. Although the barn has attracted a colossal hornets nest inside a box that contains the canning jars we need really, really badly. I will have to deal with that little task early in the morning, in the dark and cool, with a flashlight and a can of Hornet-B-Gone. Yikes. I can feel the rush of adrenalin now, just thinking about it. I am happy to have made some 'permanent' friends...regularly returning visitors to Fragments... via comments and emails that you left me after Rebecca posted the garden picture a couple of weeks ago. I look forward to hearing from some of you first time visitors who found your way here from this latest kind posting via The Pocket of Ms. R. Thanks to ya for stopping by!

Flotsam, Jetsum, Bric-a-brac Well, dear hearts, I sit here at The Helm in my Moon Boot Slippers and a flannel shirt....ah, the cool clear air of an August morning! Not to gloat: it will get hot, hazy and humid again in a week or so. But hope springs eternal; meanwhile, think I'll go out on the front porch and see if I can see my breath! Today promises to be a jewel of an Early Fall Day, with the cooler, dryer air affording unlimited visibility, and giving everything in foreground and distance an aspect of razor-sharpness. Ann is off today, and even though we are probably a mite too early, we are going to Grayson Highlands to pick what blueberries have ripened. Mostly, we are going because it is one of our favorite family places, going back more than 20 years. There are memories all over Massey Gap and Pine Mountain. More about this later, and in all probability, some pictures to boot! It's vertical bean picking time. The plants are spent, and yesterday, I plucked the plants up whole and picked the remaining beans off the plants while standing up...blessed relief from harvesting from garden produce that grows lower and lower every year. The plants usually snap off just at ground level, leaving the nitrogen-bearing root nodules of these legumes in the ground to fertilize the rows for next year's garden. By this time of year, in our low-pesticide garden, the plants were heavily infested with bean beetle larvae...1/4 inch squash colored bristly piercing-sucking machines. Once the plants and their diners were gathered and piled near the compost area, I applied the lethal biological bean beetle elimination method I call the Teva Stomp...180# of mechanical compression, the gardening version of stomping the grapes for juice. Very satisfying, and quite effective, if yukky. Note to self: NEVER walk through the squash plants in short pants, you idiot! Those things on the leaf stalks that appear to be stinging hairs...ARE stinging hairs! Fortunately, the antidote was close at hand. Touch-me-not, also called Jewel Weed, a species of wild Impatiens, is well known (among some circles) for the soothing nature of its juicy stem, for bee stings and to soothe the itchy sting of stinging nettle. It grows within a stone's throw of the garden, and I crushed the stems and rubbed it on the backs of my knees where it hurt the worst. Note to self: Jewel Weed works for the new condition called 'squash dermatitis'. Maybe on Friday, I will post the large version of my little millipede 'bullet' here...I think you'll like the image, even if you are not best friends with millipedes.

Labrador Tractor Abatement Policy Buster is our second pure-bred Black Labrador Retriever. Those of you who own Black Labs (and I have gotten quite a few comments from those who do) know that they have probably the best temperament of any large dog (I have no idea that this is gospel truth, but have never seen anything to the contrary). And being pure-bred, there should be considerable consistency of characteristics down a lineage and in the breed in general. Our first Lab was Zachary. And he and Buster share the characteristics of being broad of chest, and black. At that point the similarities pretty much end. Buster here, we have concluded, has a distinctive home-schooled quality about him. He is totally trusting, akwardly sociable with strangers, polite and never pushy; he does't bark, doesn't chew up things, and is remarkably naive about life in general. He doesn't tolerate change very well, or grasses touching his underbelly. He is most comfortable sitting in his place on the back porch, and when he comes up missing on a walk, you can pretty much know that he is already back home, curled up in front of the door. Zachary, on the other hand, was more reform-schooled. Gentle with the kids and intelligent, but headstrong. He was fully aware of how strong and formidable he was, and when a stranger drove up in the yard, Zach would charge at full speed, intent on intimidation, with a line down his back and teeth bared, and the visitor stayed in the car until we called the dog back to the house....or if it was a salesman of some sort, apologized that we were sorry but maybe they had better not roll down their windows very far, and more often than not, they would just leave. Handy dog to have around. But Zach chewed up, barked, and ran off frequently to who-knows-where and came back when he got good and danged ready. When we belonged to Zach, many years ago, there was a an old farm across the dirt road from us, with nothing but an empty and collapsed old farmhouse and a few decrepit outbuildings. This particular country person/owner came from time to time to tend the field corn that was planted there. For reasons which we never understood, Zachary could not stand that fellow, and the grizzly old farmer was likewise terrified of Zach. We wouldn't realize the man was over there until we would hear his high-pitched, squeaky voice hollering at the dog to 'get away from me!' which made the dog all the bolder. It was one of Zach's favorite sports. One day, the farmer had slipped in over the way and was walking around in the new furrows when the dog spied him through the hedge. Zach was off like a shot, the old codger saw him coming and ran in a panic for his tractor, which was idling nearby, and he was shreeking at the top of his obnoxious shrill voice and flailing his skinny arms. He mounted that tractor in a bound and hit the throttle and sped off, opposite the direction of the dog, coming hard upon him. Little problem, though. He had forgot that the plow was sunk deep in the clay soil, and as he made his panicky zigzag getaway, a two-foot-thick rope of clay and grass was laid up in a wavy line all the way back to the old barn, as old Zachary, the reform-school dog, closed the distance. It was one of the funniest sights I had seen in my short life of country living, like something off of an episode of Dukes of Hazard. This was all quite funny around the dinner table that night, and until the geezer called me on the phone the next day and told me my dog had made him ruin his pasture, and it was my responsibility to make it right, by gawd. So, every afternoon for the next week, I rolled that clay rope of fescue and dirt back into its furrow, sweating and cussing that dog, but thinking what a great memory this was going to be some day, when the blisters healed. That Zachary was his own dog, and there was nothing to do about that. Now, on the other hand, had Buster seen our farmer and his tractor across the road, he would have gone over and introduced himself, and asked the man if he could watch the plowing because in his home schooling, he was on a unit about farmers and farming, and he would promise not to get in the way, please sir. And he could not stay long, because he really needed to get back to his post up there on the front porch, thank you.

A Bug By Any Other Name I have been caught in my own deceits by Bene Diction. You are correct, BD...moths are not bugs. But then, neither are beetles, bees, or bush crickets. Only members of the Insect Order Hemiptera, are classified as "true bugs": Although the name bug has become loosly applied to most small insect-like creatures, Hemipterans are the only insects correctly identified as bugs. Members of the Order Hemiptera are characterized by sucking mouthparts that originate from the tips of their head. Their forewings are also differentiated with a thickened base and membranous tip. Moths and butterflies are Insects in the Order Lepidoptera, but they are not 'bugs', although the term bugs is used in everyday language to mean most anything small and leggy and creepy. Moths differ from butterflies in that they are generally drab and non-colorful, fly at night, and at rest, hold their wings like a person would hold their arms out to their sides, while butterflies are colorful, day-feeders, and hold their wings up overhead, like a person reaching with both arms toward the sky. Do take a look at the Entomological Database of Very Cool Bugs, a wonderful celebration of our Joint-legged fellow-creatures. The hope in my garden and insect lore here at Fragments is to have you appreciate that there is beauty, a vast wealth of learning, a source for awe and wonder... under our feet, over our heads, in our gardens and pastures, in the small things... the 'foolish things of the world to confound the wise'. I hope you enjoy what you find here and should warn you that there will be a graded ten-question pop test coming up soon, so pay attention!

Dumb Animals: Certain Pet Owners Our three-year-old Black Lab, Buster, jumps up out of a dead sleep whenever he hears me grab the keys, sit down on the bed to put on my pants or shoes, or sees me put on my glasses or cap... all signals that 'we' are going outside. His response is to run right to my feet, and do this strange little dance where he appears to be stretching and yawning, with his front paws on the floor, rump up in the air, and making a silly grin with an exasperated YIP at the end that says "hurry up". What a peculiar and silly thing for a dog to do, I think. Then I happened to read an essay in Southern Living this morning that mentioned new dogs meeting each other, offering their 'play bows' to each other. Say what? Never heard that term before. Here is what I learned: [...] the most universally recognisable signal that a dog 'wants to play' is the Play Bow in which the animal gives a kind of highly ritualised stretch which communicates a relaxed state. The display may be coupled with incomplete forward and backward leaps, i.e. approach/withdrawal (another example of mixed movements). The 'mood' is enhanced by use of another universal signal, the open-mouth 'play face' and possibly some vocalisations (play panting or barking). Seems Buster understands my behavior a lot better than I have understood his. Does your Black Lab or other pup show some variation of the 'play bow'? Enlighten me, soon. Buster is losing patience.

Type Cast: the Bug Man I suppose I will continue with my jujitsu approach to life, letting the weight and momentum of my opponent work to my advantage. Of late, I am getting the reputation of being the 'bug man' of the blogosphere (I don't see anybody else vying for the title...wonder why?) So, next in the series... As I sit here at my desk, I look out on a Butterfly Bush just outside my window; beyond that, the barn, the foot path, and the pasture. The bush, within touching distance, is literally covered in butterflies, moths, and various bees and wasps. I have become quite accustomed to these visitors, and hardly notice them much anymore, I am afraid. But yesterday, I did a double-take, seeing what at first appeared to be a honey-I-shrunk-the-hummingbird...about 1/3 the size of a hummer, but with identical hovering and jet-propelled flower-searching behavior. It is a bumblebee-looking hummingbird clearwing moth. They are not that uncommon, feeding in daylight hours, especially on tubular flowers like the Butterfly Bush, and honeysuckles. Hope now that you know they exist, you might spy one in a garden near you!

Dog Days of August Someone was lamenting the heat yesterday on the local radio, remarkng that we yet had the 'dog days of summer' to get through before we could expect any relief. I asked my son if he knew why they were call 'dog days', he didn't, so maybe it will be 'news' to you too. The term originated in the Meditteranean region, apparently, where the unhealthy weather of this period was thought to make 'dogs go mad', a time when the brightest star in the heavens, Sirius, the Dog Star, rises concurrently with the sun. The theory was that both stars in the sky all day long was to blame for the build up of heat during this time. Which of course is not the case. But if the longest day is at the time of the Summer Solstice in late June, why are our hottest days in late July and August? Because the Earth is a wonderful energy sink, storing heat in the waters and the land masses, finally reaching a maximum for heat storage in late July before the days begin to shorten, and light begins striking a more glancing blow the Earth as it begins to tilt toward winter in the northern hemisphere. Interesting to think that if the Earth did not move about this tilt of about 23 degrees through the poles, there would be no seasons...(sort of like living in Alabama again). I went out on the back porch yesterday morning and noticed the white metal chairs were missing. I found them later in the day, over behind the barn, postioned facing the southern sky, down the valley, placed just so for a great view of the Dog Star and its August companions. My son and his visiting friend had been out in those chairs the night before, under God's heaven, in conversation til the wee hours... not inside, watching a video, playing computer games, or off in a bar somewhere. Finding those chairs over in the pasture was to me a hopeful sign that maybe our children are unusual, in good ways that matter, because they grew up in the country and because our entertainment has come from the things we were able to find in our back yards and pastures, and the sky above them, right where we live.

Signs of Fall...after All! As suffocatingly hot as it was last week, I was beginning to doubt my prediction that early August would bring signs of the end of summer's deathgrip. But here it is, this week's forecast for Floyd County, Virginia: .TUESDAY NIGHT...MOSTLY CLEAR. LOWS IN THE LOWER 50S. .WEDNESDAY...MOSTLY SUNNY. HIGHS IN THE UPPER 70S. .WEDNESDAY NIGHT...MOSTLY CLEAR. LOWS IN THE LOWER 50S. .THURSDAY...MOSTLY CLEAR. HIGHS IN THE UPPER 70S. Last week's "Praise of August" was the thermal equivalent of whistling in the graveyard, a projected hope, something to live for, a possible mirage. Today: find favorite flannel shirt. Hope the cool comes to your place, too. Now, if we could please sir, have some rain?

Break a Leg, In Ten Easy Lessons! Yeah, we're out in the boonies. But how far is it from where YOU live to the nearest PRO WRESTLING CAMP!? Boogies is about 3 miles from us, as the crow flies. Driving down a most beautiful road along the Roanoke River, the appearance of Boogies takes one quite by surprise. Today, my son and a friend decided to go pay Boogie a visit, as Sundays are Match Days from 1 to 4:00. Jimmy Valiant, the Boogey Woogey Man (WWF Hall-of-Famer) takes in all types under his ample arms, to train them in the gentle art of the Ring Rope Clotheshanger, the Flying Head Scissors, and of course, the Powerbomb (Reverse Crucifix, Face First). Turns out, my son says, that ol' Boogie is nice guy, quite the gentleman, and a father-figure to no small number of young men for whom wrestling is a way out of boredom, purposelessness, and (they hope) poverty. It was an extremely poignant visit for Nate, and after five years of college, today after visiting Boogies, he has finally decided what he wants to do with his life. I hope I am kidding here. Now I might as weel tell you, I was compelled to move from North Carolina because I did not fit in. It was because of a male-linked genetic defect whereby I was born not the least bit interested in either A) kawr racin' or B) Pro Wrastlin'. I am, however, attempting to come up to masculine speed by studying the terminology of the various WWF holds, kicks, gouges and insults so as to be able to carry on a conversation at the barber shop. And of course, for general self-defense purposes, should I ever be attacked by a former highschool football lineman and part-time truck driver in a turquoise Spandex body suit, with a pink feather boa.

Let's have a show of hands: How many of you blogger-types have a 'mental image' of what the folks behind the blogs you visit regularly look like? I find I can scarcely avoid it, and that image in my head, every time I read a distinctively-flavored blog, is strongly influenced by the subject matter of the weblog, inferred or known age, nationality, gender, self-description, and/or writing style. When I do find a more detailed description about the blogger in his or her 'about' section, it really helps me 'know' my source. A few even post pictures, and that helps even more. Found yesterday: This picture of me, wife, mom and son (most wonderful daughter not on this trip)...on our visit to Ireland last year. Me without the usual beard...I DO have a chin, after all! Now, tell me, you regular visitors: you had pictured me in bib overalls with my front teeth missing and my right eye all squinched up like Festus Haggen. Am I right?

Eau de Batman: One Blogger's August Heatwave Delusion By virtue of information gathered by my moles in the field (actually short-tailed shrews) and by keeping my ear to the ground (while lying on the walk watching butterflies yesterday), I have come upon some late-breaking BLOGGING NEWS that I feel compelled to report immediately, so that you, the faithful (3) readers of Fragments, can be among the first to know, and take precautionary measures. In a bid to consolidate their hold over blogbandwidth, two Higher Organisms are rumoured to be conspiring together to lock up visit traffic to the point where Site Meter will cancel its services due to lack of traffic outside these two Mega-sites. I know I put my own safety, and that of my moles (shrews) at risk by revealing this, but I can do no less (actually, I can do much less...just ask my wife). Here is the scoop, prudent and discerning reader: You will certainly recall two recent shock-waves to ripple through the weblogging community. First, we learned that weblogs have smells. This in itself sent bloggers sniffing their pets, shoes and bed linens in an attempt to anticipate the fate of having an unfavorable olfactory stamp on their weblog, thus condemning them to only those visitors that prefer the smell of wet dog, moldy towels and kool-aid, for instance. Secondly, we have learned that Super-Heros have dating habits, and perish the thought, sex-lives. Personally, I had never heard of Elongated Man, and wish to heaven now that there was a way to expunge this Spandex-wrapped image from my mind. But that is beside the point, assuming that there really is one. Here's the kicker, and the horrible substance of what I have learned from my moles in the field. These reports are 100% accurate, mostly. You might want to sit down for this one. The two superpowers unnamed above (but you know who you are!) may soon be collaborating to assemble a massive opus combining there recent hegemonistic postings: THE SMELLS OF THE SUPER-HEROS. I understand your revulsion to this shameless exploitation of almost incomprehensible scope, reprehensible in its purient toying with our most private comicbook fantasies. But you may see it... or if possible, if you have the moral character ... avert your browser from it, in the coming days. Expect to see, for example... SUPERMAN: The Man of Steel, mild mannered reporter for the Daily Planet, wannabe paramour of Lois Lane. SMELL OF SUPERMAN: Carbon paper, BrylCreem and rust. There you have it. Is there no stopping these Two as they work under cover (not really, Mrs. Bigwig, figure of speech) behind the scene to lock up the blogging community exclusively to their own monopolistic webpages!! As the saying goes, 'forewarned is fourarmed', although I never did understand that one, particulary. And remember, you heard it first, here, on Fragments from Floyd... the Trailing Edge of Yesterday's News.

Blue Boy: Our son, the comedian. *** "Muppet-flavored" is what he calls yogurt that has gone 'blue and hairy' *** I rushed out the door with my camera, telling Nathan that I was going to take a picture of some Blue Hairstreaks. He told me later that he thought I meant I was going to Miami to take pictures of some old chicks in a convertible. Bodda-bing! Bodda-bang!

Friday Potpourri Well, Meryl, I have some humbling news. After crowing about how sparsely populated Floyd County is, all that elbow room and such, I come across an article in Outdoor Magazine yesterday while I was getting my oil changed in Christiansburg. Wow, do I feel crowded! Highlands County (billing itself as the Switzerland of Virginia) is located about 5 counties north-north east of us here. Check this out: Highlands County: population 2518 in 416 sq miles: density 6.1/sq mile Floyd County: population 14000 on 391 sq miles: density 36/sq mile Okay, that does it. We're outta here. Pack up the wagon, maw, we're aheadin' north. Astute reader Brian suggests that "You could move to Brewster County in West Texas. Population of 8,859 in 6,193 sq. miles giving an awesome density of 1.4 people per square mile". Gosh, wouldn't that be lonely, being the only whole person on your mile, with less than half a companion to keep you company! And the Dog Hair Collection Miracle, the latest in the line of the "Why Can't They Be Like Us" series has gotten the response of only one courageous guy who understands the need to educate our spouses in the ways of jujitsu housekeeping. Wylie is a wise man. Now, where are the rest of you out there? How 'bout you, Mr. Possum; Bigwig?. Surely you guy-types have some wise words regarding how these gender decisions are made at your house.... UPDATED UPDATE: Bigwig, in his typical incisive manner (oops, sorry, didn't mean to make fun of your big rabbit teeth) gives away precious secrets of the male species, and will have to remain in his warren until the rest of us guys decide what to do with him. Nevertheless, since he has let the lagomorph out of the bag, here are his tactics for chores mitigation: Number 1 is ignore them, or fail to see them, or in the case of diapers, smell them. #2 is to do lots of them very fast, in the hopes that i'll have time to myself afterwards. #3 is to do something so poorly that I will never be asked to do it again. Some combination of these usually gets me thru the day pretty well. UPDATE: This just in from PossumBLog: "Fortune has smiled upon me, in that the lovely Miss Reba is no more inclined to picking a fight with clutter and debris than I am. Of course, this does mean that rather than trying to come to terms with the best way to pick up bits of stuff, we discuss how long it will be before we have to move to another house to escape the ever encroaching tide of Pokemon cards, shoe laces, Barbie accessories, hair barettes, bits of string, small sparkley notebooks, Hot Wheels, socks, books, jigsaw puzzle pieces, crumbs, skillets, bills, earphones, wrappers, and great huge wads of long, flowing girl hair which cling to every square inch of carpet in the house. We estimate another three days before critical mass is reached." Yeah, buddies. What a way to go. Death by entropy. The guy way. Like God intended. Not death by chronically recurring attacks of Neatness, like being nibbled to death by mice!. Also during the oil change, I picked up the Roanoke paper, noticing a picture of the Dean of the School of Allied Health at a nearby college, a fellow I have known professionally for several years. Cool, he made the front page...check it out. DEAD at age 51. Maybe I'll stay away from the newspaper after all. And no more oil changes where they have 'current events'. Ignorance is bliss. I should be exceedingly blissful, then. I have been weblogging long enough now to have some meaningful visit patterns on my hit-meter history. Interesting: Tuesdays consistently highest, bounded by second highest Mon and Tues, then down from Th to Sun and back up again on Mondays. Some late night visits from Europe, peak apparently after eastern time zone folks get to work 8-9:00 a.m., and at lunch time, and 8-9:00 at night. I wish that Fragments topics ... vegetables, clouds and weather, and insects ... were more controversial. It would generate more interesting email and comments than "we got bees here, too". So far, there has not been a great deal of repartee regarding the squash, honeybees or corn. But I have plans, folks. Just stay tuned. Coming up soon in Fragments: the lost hiking stick; America's largest amphibian; and Rat Head Stew. Ooooh! And another insect picture, maybe on Saturday! Now more bug pictures should generate some real excitement! Grrroooovy, Baby!

Caption: Tomato Horn Worm shows evidence of Braconid wasp parasitism. The Rest of the Story: When I saw this in the garden this morning, I whooped like I had won the lottery. In the eye of the beholder, this is beautiful. I think I can explain. This picture I took in the garden this morning illustrates that plants, contrary to the thinking of the average college biology student, are not defenseless creatures. I'm not even talking about thorns, waxy cuticles, noxious tastes and poisonous substances that prevent being eaten by insects or mammals. Plants 'know' when they are being eaten, even apparently WHO is eating them, and can chemically signal an army to protect them from attack. Pardon the anthropomorphic language, but plants really are smarter than we typically give them credit for being. And here is a great example: The Tomato Horn Worm pictured here is a weeny. Full grown, they can be 4 inches long and almost an inch thick. Hiding among the dense tomato leaves, they are all but invisible until you finally see that half the plant has been skeletonized, or see their droppings on a leaf below where one is feeding. The tomato plant responds to the Horn Worm by exuding a chemical much like a pheromone in mammals. This chemical signal is detected by small, inconspicuous Braconid wasps who then come to the scent, and find the caterpillars hiding deep in the plant foliage. The female wasp then uses her sharp ovipositor to inject a couple of dozen or more fertilized eggs into the soft body of the worm. They hatch and eat the caterpillar from the inside. The worm, understandably, loses its appetite, and pretty much just stays fixed on the plant without feeding, itself a Happy Meal. At the stage you see here, the hatched eggs have become larvae which have pupated into silky white cases on the exterior of the hornworm. Soon they will mature and cut their way out of the pupa case, and will head off to repeat the process, hopefully, elsewhere in our garden. So far, I have found three hornworms, and each was stopped in its tracks, covered with white worm-eating wasp babies. After all our hard work nurturing these tomato plants along, it is truly a thing of beauty to see these wormy green garden gargoyles become "the eaten" instead of our produce!

The Dog Hair Collection Miracle For any of you who eventually wander down to see us here, I don't want you to be surprised that we live with a horse in our house. At least some times it seems that way, growing up with Chihauhuas in the house as a child. Buster the Black Lab is somewhat less than 100 pounds. He doesn't bark. He doesn't have accidents on the floor. And he has never chewed up anything, although he is fond of fetching scanties from the bedroom, even taking underthings out of the drawer in the bureau, if Ann forgets to close it. He just sort of carries them around, like trophies; so far, he hasn't chewed the crotch out of anything. But what he does in the house is shed. Copious quantities of short black hair. Every month of the year, some worse than others. This fact really stresses out the Manager of Flooring Hygiene, who advises daily rounds with the Quickie mop and at least tri-weekly vacuuming. Now I have what I think is a much better idea for low-effort dog hair control, now that we have started pretty much keeping the ceiling fans on during the hot weather here. I always tend to think in terms of economy of motion and effort, and believe that if God didn't mean for us to sit most of the time, he wouldn't have given most of us such large sitting equipment, don't you agree? What I have discovered is that eventually, the dog hair will come to me. If I just sit patiently, I can pluck it right there where my arm hangs down off the couch, right next to my beer. I consider it a wonderful observation that the fans, if turned up to turbo speed, in effect, create dog-hair tumbleweeds that move about the room, gathering more and more hair until by virtue of sheer weight, they gather in corners, or against objects, like the couch of which I speak. Always an advocate of the jujitsu method in gardening, tax preparation and house cleaning, I have proposed to my lovely wife that we let the black hair self-collect in the manner I describe, while watching Gunsmoke, for instance. "I AM cleaning", I tell her, and hold up a wad big enough to stuff a pillow, while reaching for my Milwalkee's Best. As incredible as it may seem, I am afraid she just doesn't get it. Is it a guy thing, being able to see with such clarity what is apparently hidden from feminine eyes? I am sure you have your own examples of this terrible dichotomy between reason and robotic tyranny to habit learned from mothers past. Come on, guys, help me out here. Give me some more examples to hold up to my little missy to show her the pervasive male energy-conserving wisdom that is out there, such that can make wifely co-existance possible in our lifetimes, if only they will see the light. Bless their little hearts.

In Praise of August! It is August at last. True, there may not be a great deal of difference in day or night-time temperatures, yet. But here in southwest Virginia, we can typically expect a tantalizing preview of Fall during the first half of the month, and there are 'signs of Fall' already, if you know what to look for. The fall plants are up, although they're not very conspicuous yet. You won't notice them as you drive along the highway for another three weeks or so. But it is part of the pattern of things that the goldenrod, Queen of the Meadow (Joe Pye Weed) and Ironweed are soon to bloom, adding rich deep yellow, dusky mauve and royal purple to the pallet of color in every meadow and pasture border. The starlings begin to grow restless, bunch up, then break apart into little groups again, like they cannot quite get comfortable with each other in a crowd. The instinct to migrate must be a powerful itch. It won't be long before an occasional Monarch butterfly shows up, passing by in loops and glides. Winged wisps of will, floating on the rising heat, at first in no particular direction and free of hurry, but then, later, unfailingly westward, toward winter roosts in Baha...in such numbers that they break branches out of trees. Wooly worms show up here in the next week or two. Again, not in large numbers, discovered here and there under a piece of firewood or scattered slab of barn board. Later, they cross the roads in large numbers in their brown and black three piece suits, looking for shelter for the coming winter. In August, the locusts and walnuts, last to get their spring leaves, are first to shed them. Sumac will be among the first to redden, then Virginia Creeper...well ahead of the poplars, hickorys and maples...harbingers of Fall. Some of the 'fallness' that I know I will feel this week, or next, has nothing to do with changes in the visible sense. It is a sensation that may be the feeling of the imperceptible loss of time as the days shorten, a resetting of our internal clocks that wake us up at certain points in the season, just like our inner alarms awaken us promptly every morning. I am confident that if you blindfolded me, and spun me around ten times, and placed me anywhere on the calender, I could tell you "this is early August", just by the feel of it. Today I will breathe in the new smells that August will pour out in the valley...the scent of old hay, corn stalks going but not quite gone by, and a potpourri of plant matter in profusion, baked dry and fragrant by the July sun: monarda and pennyroyal, spicebush and sassafras. These aromas were present but not acknowledged in late July, but today I will seek them out, celebrate their presence, and stop more frequently for deep drafts of it during the day. This week, or the next, I will exclaim "that is a Fall sky!" The round piled and billowed clouds of summer for a day or two will give way to clouds streaked and smeared, thin, high and attenuated with the ends turned up, against a turquoise sky. Fall will make a few short sortees in August, then retreat, and return again to stay longer each visit. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. It is time for Fall, and I will be glad in it.