The Nature of Things

I came home from my trip last week to find a yard full of young birds. Fledglings were everywhere it seemed, and their voices resonated from every tree and every likely perch. When we had left on our trip, the Red-bellied Woodpecker babies had just left their nest. They were still very dependent on their parents to find food for them. A week later, I returned to find very competent young woodpeckers visiting the feeders on their own and feeding themselves without any instruction or assistance from parents. Before we left, I had seen one or two young Northern Cardinals following their papa around, but now everywhere I look in the garden there seems to be a cardinal with a dark beak marking it as a youngster and they are feeding themselves and obviously are on their own. It's hard to count just how many there are, because, of course, they move around a lot, but I feel certain there is more than one family here. Cardinals tend to be somewhat less aggressively territorial than so...

There aren't any movies out right now that I really care to see. There's not much on television that I want to watch except for my Houston Astros and they are doing so poorly that it is often painful to watch them. It's too hot and miserable for outside activities except for the absolutely necessary ones in the garden and I'm not really into knitting, so that leaves me with reading as my summertime leisure activity. Fortunately, there is no shortage of good books to keep me entertained. I've just finished another one. Remarkable Creatures , the title of Tracy Chevalier's book, could refer to the fossils found by Mary Anning along a rocky, windswept English beach or it could refer to Anning herself and her friend and champion Elizabeth Philpot, for these were, indeed, extraordinary women. At a time - the late 18th and early 19th centuries - when women were only allowed one honorable role in life, that of wife and mother, these two women carved their own plac...

We like to feel that our justice system is superior and above suspicion and we tend to look with disdain at some countries with obviously biased and corrupt judges. This week we learned that we may not have so much to feel superior about. It seems that two Louisiana judges who have rendered decisions on the government's attempt to place a moratorium on deep-water oil drilling until the causes of the BP catastrophe in the Gulf can be determined have financial interests in keeping the drilling going. Can you guess what their rulings were? That's right. The moratorium was ruled illegitimate. Now both of these judges may be honorable man and they may not have stopped to consider their own financial interest when they were making their rulings. But how will we ever know? These men own stock in drilling companies and in companies that service oil drilling companies. Is it really possible that they didn't even think about that when they were considering the facts of the ca...

I spent some time in a doctor's office waiting room today waiting for my husband. During much of my hour-and-a-half there, the room was very crowded with strangers. I had brought my Kindle and was trying to read Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson. It's a novel of manners about the way people treat each other and about their expectations of each other. It reminds me somewhat of Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie series. It has the same gentle, meandering feel to it. Anyway, I was trying to concentrate on my book, but at some point, it just became impossible. On the opposite side of the room from me several rather elderly - that is to say older than me - people were seated, and, as always seems to happen in these circumstances, one of them, a woman, had a loud and abrasive voice and manner and she insisted on telling the others her life story and especially her medical history. A couple of other people there entered eagerly into the spirit of the...

Stanley McChrystal has proved himself again and again to be a loose cannon. He has been in trouble before and been called on the carpet before for things that he has said and actions he has taken that have called into question the plans and orders of his superiors. This is not what we expect of a member of the military services, and especially not one who has reached the rank of general. McChrystal is a checkered character in many ways. There was torture and mistreatment of prisoners under his watch while in Iraq. He's never been called to account for that. He was also at the center of the cover-up regarding the friendly fire death of Pat Tillman, the former NFL star, in Afghanistan. The Tillman death was presented to the world as a heroic death in battle, whereas, in fact, it was a result of a series of errors. A lie was created because the administration in Washington needed a hero to sell the war. McChrystal was complicit in constructing that lie. And yet with all that ba...

Note: This blog will be wordless for about a week while I am on the road. Meet me back here around the middle of next week and we'll continue the conversation.

I tend to tune out the Blue Jays these days. Since their young ones have fledged, there seem to be about twenty of the birds in my yard at all time. Well, I'm exaggerating just a bit. There are probably more like ten, but they are so loud they sound like twenty. Or thirty. The birds always seem to be raising a ruckus about something, often about the Cooper's Hawk pair that nest in the neighborhood and that frequently hunt in my yard. Well, it is the jays' duty to warn the other birds, so I can't really get mad at them for raising a fuss, but, for me, and maybe even for the birds, they are like the little boy who cried "Wolf!" once to often. After a while, I just tend to ignore them. So, I wasn't paying much attention when they started their alarm yesterday, but it went on for so long that I finally looked up from my task and saw a beautiful Swallow-tailed Kite lazily circling over my yard. Apparently this lovely creature was the source of the jays...