The Nature of Things

My mother died on the first day of spring in 2004. I've often ruminated on the unfairness of that - that she should have died on the first day of the season she loved best. My mother was a gardener, you see, and she looked forward to spring as the time that her garden would begin again. She spent winter poring over seed catalogs and planning what she would plant. She was a farm wife and her emphasis and most of her energies were always spent on the vegetable garden. As a farm family, we grew most of our own food. But she also grew some flowers and other ornamentals as food for the soul. I have essentially reversed her gardening practices, growing mostly ornamentals with a few vegetables on the side. I often think about my mother when I'm gardening. I sometimes feel that she is very close, looking over my shoulder and maybe shaking her head at my stupidity. I think of her most often when I'm working on some of the old-fashioned plants that she grew.  Plants like four o'c...

In one of my earlier incarnations, I very much wanted to study the origins of homo sapiens on Earth. I was extremely interested in archaeology, with an emphasis on paleo archaeology and anthropology. My heroes were people like the Leakey family, Donald Johanson (discover of the hominid known as "Lucy"), and Leakey proteges like Diane Fosse and Jane Goodall. At some point, I shifted my emphasis to the paleo history of the Americas and read everything I could find about it. At the time I first became interested, the conventional wisdom was - and, in fact, for a long time continued to be - that humans first set foot on these continents via a bridge from Asia that existed across the Bering Straits around 13,000 to 11,000 years ago. They were designated as the Clovis people based on distinctive spearheads that were found among mammoth bones near Clovis, New Mexico. Those spearheads were found in the 1930s and the theory that arose from them held sway in the archeological community...

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld My rating: 4 of 5 stars It has been 200 years since Jane Austen wrote her books that are still cherished by lovers of a good story. Those books have been often imitated, updated, and pastiched by other writers. Nothing wrong with that. Writers steal from each other all the time. After all, there is nothing new under the sun, and, anyway, it was all written before by Shakespeare 500 years ago. Pride and Prejudice , Austen's most beloved book, is, naturally, the one most copied by others, and Eligible is just the latest effort on that front. Eligible is part of something called "The Austen Project" in which modern authors are invited to reimagine her books. It is the fourth in the series. Emma , Sense and Sensibility , and Northanger Abbey have already been done by Alexander McCall Smith, Joanna Trollope, and Val McDermid, respectively. I haven't read the other books, but if they are on a par with this one, they would very much be worth...

The flowers of May have inspired many poets, including Vrunda Shankara. May Flowers by Vrunda Shankara As the April showers lash  A respite from the summer heat, Now time for summer blossoms,  As if on cue,  the bare trees,  puts on green, fresh leaves. And in few days,  decks itself up,  with beauteous red blooms,  May Flowers. The red colour, so deep,  One can get lost in it,  An aroma, a smell,  so faint,  yet, felt from a distance. As the May flowers,  fills the air,  all that is heard is,  the buzz of the bees,  songs of a sun bird. Pretty are the trees,  but, splendid are the trees,  With mayflowers.  ~~~ Indeed, May might be our most floriferous month. Maybe that's why our Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day host, Carol, named her blog "May Dreams Gardens." So, what's blooming in my garden on this Bloom Day? Take a look. There are day lilies, of course.  And oleanders. Pink. And red. There are r...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : I had my first sighting of the year of a Common Nighthawk over my yard this week, at about 8:00 in the evening. They pass through in great numbers at this time of year and many of them spend the summer with us. I hope to be seeing them  and hearing their calls late in the day all summer long.  As they cross the Gulf on their way north in the spring, many of them make landfall at Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge on the coast. That's where I took this picture a couple of springs ago.   *~*~*~* Happy World Migratory Bird Day!   In 2016, International Migratory Bird Day highlights the importance of international efforts to conserve birds through agreements, laws, treaties, and collaborations. This year also marks the Centennial of the Migratory Bird Treaty, a landmark agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico to protect our shared migratory birds. *~*~*~* Scientists have been warning for decades that climat...

A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth  George My rating: 4 of 5 stars As an avid reader of mystery series, why have I never picked up one of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley books? After all, she's one of the most successful mystery writers now on the scene. I've finally remedied my oversight by reading the first book in the series and the writer's first novel, A Great Deliverance . I won't wait so long to peruse the second book in the series, because this was a terrific read. Here are a few of the things that I liked about the book: The setting. Yorkshire, with its gray, windy moors and small, insular villages is a dark and mysterious place all on its own. Here, George takes us to the little village of Keldale where a local respected farmer has been found decapitated in his barn, his dead body slumped over the also dead body of his old dog whose throat had been slit. Most shockingly, his daughter is seated on an upturned bucket nearby with an axe on her lap. She sa...

I hung my oriole feeder and waited for the orioles to show up. And very soon a bird did show up. Wow, that is one funny looking oriole! Wait, that isn't an oriole! No, it is the boss of the backyard, the Northern Mockingbird . After a while, an Baltimore Oriole did actually come to investigate. This is a first year male who hasn't yet morphed into the gaudy orange and black feathers of the adult males.  It didn't take him long to get around to checking out the feeder. This is a second sub-adult male enjoying one of the orange halves. So far, I've seen four or five orioles around the feeders and they have all been sub-adult males. I've concluded that most likely the mature adults have already passed through, maybe even before I got my feeder hung. Perhaps they were early this year, like everything else.  The orioles are no match for this bossy mockingbird who has chased at least a couple of birds away from the feeder. He doesn't seem too interested in the oran...