I only woke up four or five times last night, that's how tired I was. And I slept all the way till five ( Read more... )

I have been using up my birthday treasures so fast that I've changed my strategy. Yesterday's eclipse was so lovely not just in itself but the relief from the news, that when I woke up to the prospect of the orange horror playing video games with people's lives in Afghanistan I made a conscious decision to look for moments of beauty every day-- ( Read more... )

After years of not blooming, or at most popping one or two blossoms, my honeysuckle has gone wild.


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When you have a very, very tiny garden, you take your joy where you can get it. Like my little lily patch, which I have been nursing along for fifteen years:


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We went out to Jamaica State Park after a morning of closer strolling around.

I kind of went overboard shooting red trees.


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We got off the road and began wandering, first over the town, and after lunch on the Connecticut River, hit the trails.

We had lunch here:


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The landscape is all so beautiful. Gentle hills and tree-cupping valleys marked by charmingly curving waterways--this is glacier carved territory, smoothed by centuries of rain and flourishing greenery, unlike the drama of tectonic violence at my end of the continent ( Read more... )

A look at one of the many recent iterations of Beauty and the Beast caused me to mull the persistence of this myth/fairy tale, how it's been interpreted, and what's going on in today's literary conversation over it ( Read more... )

Trudging back home, after a long morning of errands while feeling like I've been trampled by rhinos, I saw this blooming away in front of a neighbor's:


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Especially if you, like me, have never seen the aurora borealis in person. Via lnhammer, here.