magicicada

I thought magicicada was someone's play on words: Magic cicada.  That would be fitting for these creatures, but no, it is the scientific name for the periodic 17-year cicadas that are emerging in Southeastern Ohio this week.  Ani and I got up early this morning to walk the neighborhood, looking for signs of their arrival. We didn't have to go far, and within a block found hundreds.

We found them in all stages of emergence.  The one above has just emerged from its nymphal shell, leaving behind its molt, and is hanging there drying. When it's done, it will have pigmentation, orange and black marks, darker wings.  It still won't be fully ready to start its vibrational love songs yet; it takes a few days to harden its exoskeleton completely.  We won't know exactly what species we have here until they begin "singing".

The photo above is of a nymph that has climbed out of its hole at the base of the tree and has yet to split its exoskeleton to emerge.  The one below has started that process, and hopefully will fully emerge before starting to dry and harden.

There are so many things that could go wrong.  Your wing could not fully develop; you could get caught in your former exoskeleton and die partially emerged; you could get eaten by an excited predator, and finished off by a voracious slug.

They are so delicate, so beautiful, and so gentle.  Their defense is in their astounding numbers - they don't bite or sting, are not toxic (though our local paper suggested refraining from eating them because they apparently absorb high levels of mercury from the soil during their seventeen-year hibernation. Ok).  

We found several that were languishing on the sidewalk, weak and upside down, and they willingly held onto my finger while I transported them to a more suitable spot on a tree. It made me think of this story from a few years ago, of Eliza rescuing a cicada from the water, when it began to purr in her hand.  We so often attribute human intentions or sentiments to the behavior of animals, but those animals are usually larger and furrier, with big wet eyes and tongues.  I feel those things with cicadas. Maybe it's the big eyes? The slow movements and grateful wrapping of a finger? 

Before my camera battery gave out (it doesn't take too long, and there were so many wonderful moments to record!), Ani and I saw this guy, and we both immediately felt pangs of empathy and tenderness, projecting our own sadness about letting go of the old even while in the throes of the new and beautiful.  It's ok, little buddy. We're here to witness your amazing transformation and welcome you to this part of your journey!

autumn yarden

We don't have much of a garden, but there are a couple of things that flourish. One of them is our comfrey, dug up from our plot at the community garden, and unwittingly transplanted here when I read that the leaves make great compost. Yeah, great compost and tremendously deep tap roots that are impossible to dig back out!  It's not that I don't love the comfrey - I really love that it still has purple blooms, long after my friend Jen's comfrey plant on their hilltop farm has completely died back, because on really warm days like today there are still bees and monarchs out doing their thing, and our comfrey is their favorite spot.

We also have impressive "poop mushrooms" that flourish on the presents the neighborhood dogs leave in abundance in our yard.  They're like little condominiums of fungi, aren't they?

Ah, then there is the horseradish.  Our horseradish did so well that when I ripped up the pot to move it out of the way for the house-painters this summer, the plant in the pot died, but there were so many healthy roots left in the ground that a whole new village of horseradish popped up! My favorite part of the horseradish, of course, are its pests.  I know, it's not right, and I'm clearly not really a gardener, but you have to admit I have honed my ability to appreciate the littlest things.

My friend Molly, who has an admirable passion for healthy soil, has given me buckets of wealth from her compost pile, and along with the soil came a few volunteers. My favorite is a dark purple beauty from the mint family, called shiso.  Look who we found amongst its leaves:

Ani and I spent quite a bit of time this fall puttering in the yarden, taking photos and finding bugs. We harvested our abundant lemon balm and made a tincture for the first time...

end of summer toes

...and more than a few hours reading on our little stoop, enjoying our tiny kingdom.  I think that every year somehow our garden will transform into something respectable, but every year it does its own thing and the deer eat the morning glory leaves and the beans, or the hollyhocks just downright disappear and the milkweed I thought was definitely dead just shows up one day.  It's a ride, I tell ya. 

*I can't even pretend to understand what is happening with the formatting in this post! I've fixed it several times, but I SURRENDER! There is a husband, a cat, and netflix waiting for me and time's a-tickin!

sunlight and insect juice

from Brian Doyle's Children and Other Wild Animals

A sparrow, tiny and cocky, shouting at cars and dogs.  A finch pouring summer from its mouth. A tree swallow, no bigger than the hand of a child, carving the huge air into circles of iridescent green and blue and black.  It swims and slices through the air.  It is as light as a whip tip.  It is made of sunlight and insect juice, exuberance and desire.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

"...made of sunlight and insect juice, exuberance and desire"

Mmmm, I love that. Thinking about the swallowtail caterpillars eating our dill (happily eating, happily giving), the deer eating our morning glory leaves and bean leaves.  Oh, and the Queen Anne's lace, which yes, I know is a weed, but I love it, visiting my garden like a hobo who has decided to leave its roadside journey for a stop at the nice lady's house. The finches, "pouring summer" from their mouths as they chide me for running out of seed for the second time this week. The sunlight and rain connecting everything in our days...

swallowtail on dill

scarlet runner beans - BEFORE the deer ate them

baby monarda

echinacea

The plants growing in the cracks, made up of duff and rainwash, which sometimes is just enough.

renegade snap dragons, growin' where they wanna

And then there are the mushrooms (you knew we were going there, didn't you?)...Everyone is complaining about the rain we've had this summer, but I feel so richly blessed by the abundance of diversity the rains bring.  Mushrooms, made of pine, hickory, oak...some discriminatingly choosing one species, others easily adapting to what they find around them, devouring and becoming and then showing their incredible blooms.

chanterelles?

Definitey an anglerfish. Clearly fungus and fish are related.

The prize: lactarius indigo. I always feel like I'm speaking fake latin
when I can remember this name. Naw, it couldn't be "lactarius indigo". It is. Milky blue.

This morning I am made of birdsong and coffee.  Sweat and sweet hay smell, tired smiles and friendly talk.  Farm eggs and sausage, Encyclopedia Brown and Ani chatter.  Contentment and bustle. What about you?

late summer feast

Is this post not what you thought it might be? No late-harvest vegetables or farmer's market pictures, just these fantastic beings - wheel bugs (Arilus cristatus) - that caught my eye one day in October along the bike path.  It was such a find, and I literally spotted them hanging off of a stalk from feet away, they were so big.  Of course, there were two, it turned out, and look at the multi-tasking feat they were pulling off...

can you still see the bee?

Remember the bee? Ha ha, no longer. These are pierce-and-suckers and they were in fine form! I fell way behind the others I was walking with. This kind of thing makes me so deeply happy.

Really, it does not take much to make me feel alive.

This writing-every-day thing might be too much for me.  First, I am not a great planner when it comes to writing. It just...happens...or it doesn't.  And oh, the self-judging.  I find myself evaluating my stories - most of them of the mothering-homeschooling genre, naturally - and finding them lacking a good clean finish, a button, "and so I learned the most valuable thing about the totally freaking horrible day we just had!  I feel so blessed that our day was so horrible!!"  If they end still mired in the horrible, who is going to want to read them?? There are days when I think I won't ever write another post because if I did it would be full of language that my most loyal reader - my mom - would cringe to read.  Faced with the daily writing, I'm running up against at least a few hours worth of cringe-worthy material. We'll see where this gets me.  I suspect I'll either stick to my goal and you'll read a whole lot of crap with a few aha moments jammed in there - or you won't! - or I'll take a bit more time to find the way to say the things that are floating around in here.  For any dear someone who is still reading this seven-year-old blog at this point, you deserve a well-written post or two! 

As you might have surmised, I have challenged myself to write a post every day this month. Shoo, what was I thinking?

to the centipede in my bathroom

photo and origami credit

You crawled through the Devonian,
and out from under the sink

feathered like a moth's
antennae,
striped and leggy

you pour over the edges and corners

I think of
a shrimp,
delicately constructed
like tissue-paper origami

to sit on the pastic splashboard,
having circled the remains
of toothpaste and paint
to hover under the ledge of the medicine
cabinet.

Out of prehistory
into the now,
a quicksilver fossil
made of liquid and light.

This post is a part of my attempt to write a post every day in November. So far so good.

Westward Ho! The Epic Journey

Y'know how long it takes to get ready for a trip? So much time plotting, dreaming, planning, scheduling, figuring, reworking the puzzle.  I almost can't believe we got out the door, but we did.

Ohio...Kentucky...Indiana...

Harmonie State Park: swimming pool, hummingbirds, fireflies!

Illinois...Missouri...(reading about Sacagawea and Lewis and Clark, even as we crossed the Missouri River)...Kansas...

The soundtrack of the trip has definitely been The Beatles, with some classic rock thrown in as we travel through the cities...

Milford Lake State Park: cicadas, mayflies, dragonflies, and a storm in the night

emerging by flashlight - can you believe it?!

 Yes, we will probably remember this trip by the insects we saw (that actually wasn't a play on my mentioning The Beatles, believe it or not). Do you remember all of the damselflies at the campsite in Kansas?  At one point, Ani came running pell-mell from the bathrooms, yelling at the top of her lungs, Mama!!! For a half-second I panicked that Eliza had fallen in the shower or something horrible, but no. It was a dragonfly that had alighted on the bathroom wall.  Eliza was guarding it for me so I could take a picture...

the adult mayfly lives only a day

going, going, going - you're in the West when the skies get so wide

more Kansas...

Overheard from the back seat: Kansas looks like Mongolia, don't you think? Yeah, Mongolia, but without the purple mountains in the background.  General head-nodding in agreement...There's been the expected squabbling in the car, but it has been manageable and dang, I have to say, it is so much easier to travel with the girls at these ages.  We talk, we read, we sing, we talk some more...we sink into our own daydreams and then start all over again.

more Kansas...

 At one point Ani asked, What are we calling this trip? We settled on Westward Ho! and she insisted that it needed The Epic Journey thrown in for good measure.

finally, the mountains - can you see them? Ani dubbed these the "toehills"

Colorado!

mule deer 

Roxborough State Park

Denver in the distance

Cousins!!

Uncle Tim and Cousin Matt

 We got a tour of the "real" mountains yesterday, driving along the South Platte River and up, up, up...

a shot out the window, going up the Boreas Pass, a long, narrow gravel road

mouse-ear chickweed

SNOW!

orange paintbrush

looking down on Breckenridge

After lunch in Breckenridge, we braved the chairlift at Peak Seven.  Singing helped Eliza and me, and how lucky that we know a song about the great divide...

We made it!

Our wonderful hosts, Gen and Tim

It is surreal to suddenly be in the snowy peaks.  On the top of the world.  The plants are small, the trees sparse and the view so long.

tiny violets

Rocky Mountain Pentstemon

Today we made lemonade of lemons; our car has been having trouble and leaking coolant...yeah, and we're in the mountains and today in an attempt to replace a hose, we saw a large problem with the radiator (it was a hole), so long story short, we stayed an extra day with our generous hosts who suggested a trip into the big city on the light rail. 

new Union Station

black-crowned night heron, enjoying the confluence of the North Platte and Cherry Creek in downtown Denver

And that is why I have a moment just now to share photos and a few words from the journey!  We'll travel on in the morning, over the mountains and closer to the Pacific...