The Nature of Things

Our mothers teach us many things, both by their words and their actions. My mother was a woman of few words but many actions. What I learned from those actions, primarily, was compassion for others.  I think Julia Kasdorf's mother must have been a lot like mine. What I Learned From My Mother by Julia Kasdorf Related Poem Content Details I learned from my mother how to love  the living, to have plenty of vases on hand  in case you have to rush to the hospital  with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants  still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars  large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole  grieving household, to cube home-canned pears  and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins  and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.  I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know  the deceased, to press the moist hands  of the living, to look in their eyes and offer  sympathy, as though I understood loss even t...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : A male House Finch sings his melodic song from a bare branch, proclaiming that this territory is his. *~*~*~* In one single deadly night in Galveston on Wednesday, 398 birds, mostly migrating warblers, crashed into a high rise building there ; 395 of the birds died and three survived. Countless birds are killed each year by crashing into such buildings right across the continent. You see, songbirds migrate mostly at night when their predators are sleeping, and the city lights left burning in tall buildings confuse the birds and cause them to become disoriented with disastrous results. *~*~*~*  The Dakota Access Pipeline is not operational yet and already it is leaking , outraging the indigenous groups and their supporters who have long warned that it is a threat to the environment. *~*~*~* Glacier National Park may have to be renamed. It is losing its glaciers . The warming climate makes it inevitable that the contiguous ...

Tana French takes on the fraught atmosphere of a girls' boarding school in the leafy suburbs of Dublin in her fifth entry in the Dublin Murder Squad series. As with the earlier books in the series, this one features a different detective but one that we have met before in an earlier book, Faithful Place, and it includes other characters that we've met before, as well as a new female detective in the Murder Squad, Antoinette Conway. The detective that we met before is Stephen Moran, who, when we encounter him this time, is working Cold Cases. He is contacted by Holly Mackey, Undercover chief Frank Mackey's daughter, who has information about a murder that took place a year before. Moran met Holly when she was a nine-year-old and he and his partner were investigating a murder in Faithful Place, where Frank Mackey grew up. Holly is now a 16-year-old and she is attending St. Kilda's School. She is part of a tight-knit group of four girls. The previous year, a handsome, popu...

Tickseed - an unlovely name for a lovely plant. Not only is it beautiful but it is very easy to grow throughout USDA zones 3 to 9. It grows wild in many forms around here, and this time of year our roadsides are brightened by waves of its yellow flowers. Their formal name is Coreopsis , but they are commonly called tickseed because the seeds often hitch a ride on humans or animals that brush against them. The plant is classified as herbaceous perennial and it reseeds prolifically, so once it gets its start in your garden, you will likely find many "volunteer" plants the following year.  The particular variety that I have in my garden got its start as seeds in a wildflower mix packet that I bought at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin several years ago. I'm not sure what the variety name is but it makes a plant about 2 1/2 feet tall and at least that wide and it is covered in flowers throughout the summer (summer starts in May here) and fall. Tickseed is not...

I love this poem. It is contemplative; the poet is looking back on his life and seeing the striations laid down by the events of that life, like geological layers.  Looking at the walls of a canyon, the Grand Canyon, for example, one can see those geological layers stacked one on the other, building all the way up to the surface. And so it is with our lives. Some of those layers are ones we would just as soon forget, but they all are a part of what made us who we are.  The poet is saying that we should not be distracted by the litter of our daily lives; we should embrace and live in the layers, the solid stuff that made us.  The Layers by Stanley Kunitz Related Poem Content Details I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward th...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : A lot of new birds showed up in and around my yard this week: Summer Tanager , Yellow-breasted Chat , Great Crested Flycatcher , Rose-breasted Grosbeak . And then late yesterday afternoon this one came calling - literally. It is the Common Nighthawk and I probably would not have noticed it except that I heard it calling as it circled around the skies over my backyard looking for insects.   Here's a closer view of the cryptically colored bird. I photographed this one sitting on a post at Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge a couple of years ago. *~*~*~* It takes a lot of energy to keep a hummingbird humming, and for them, that means mainly nectar. It turns out that, not surprisingly, they prefer high sugar nectar, but will accept the lower sugar nectar if necessary. In areas where more than one species of the birds compete, such as Brazil, the more dominant species take the higher sugar nectar and the lower status birds ...

What a strange little book. I tried to think of something in my reading experience with which to compare it and the only thing that came to mind was Kafka's The Metamorphosis, but instead of waking up to find herself transformed into a giant insect, Yeong-hye awoke one morning from a troubled dream of blood and gore and cruelty and decides to give up the eating of all flesh; to become a vegetarian. For her avidly meat-eating family, a metamorphosis into a giant cockroach might have been preferable. They are appalled and outraged.  At a family gathering some time after she makes her decision, they try to force her to eat meat. Her brutal father slaps her twice and forces a piece of meat between her lips, but Yeong-hye manages to spit it out and then grabs a knife and slits her wrist. As her blood spurts out, the only one who comes to her aid is her brother-in-law, while her parents, her husband, sister, brother, and sister-in-law look on. What is wrong with these people? Well, a lot...