Friday, April 28, 2006

Monday, April 17, 2006

Forsythia and Lavender

We didn't have any forsythia where I grew up. I never saw it until I moved here. So it remains exotic for me. It's a sign of spring, but not a nostalgic one.

One thing we did have was those tiny, pale purple butterflies. I saw two of them while walking in the woods yesterday. The insides of their wings are the palest lavender, or perhaps violet. The outsides of their wings are gray and colorless. When they sit down and fold their wings, they look like nothing at all. But flying, they are so beautiful.

Monday, April 10, 2006

New Buds of Spring

Some people think that Nature is a cruel and violent place. I was on a web site recently where someone commented, "Once you start looking closely at nature, all you will see is things killing other things." Death is part of nature. Certainly on this blog I write about dead animals rather a lot.

But anybody who has looked closely at Nature in the springtime will see more than things killing other things. The trees are budding out in green and red. The birds are suddenly making a lot more racket. In some places (not here) frogs' eggs will soon be hatching and at night the little tadpoles will start peeping. Not to mention all the flowers, which get mentioned so often.

Nature is about life: life passing into death and returning into life. If it weren't for Nature, none of us would be here. We are the natural world.

We are the natural world.

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Another Spider

I have one of those water pitchers with a filter inside. A couple days ago, I lifted the lid off the pitcher to refill it, and there was a spider underneath, on the inside of the lid. I don't quite understand how it got in there. The lid doesn't screw on or anything like that, but there aren't supposed to be any spider-sized gaps between the lid and the pitcher.

I took the spider (on the lid) into the bathroom, explaining to it that this is not a Third World country. Here in America, we don't go for insects in our food, alive or dead. (Yes, even in America we get insects in our houses. And I do kill some of them. But not spiders.)

It was a very cute little brown spider though. Not like the one that started off this blog.