Tag Archives: Beauty

Robins building nests

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clear ceiling over deck beam with robin in nest on beam

We have robins nesting again in the beams of our deck! Two years ago, a pair of robins raised three broods of chicks over the course of the season. The year before that, in 2022, they had tried, but failed, and it seemed the clear ceiling raised the heat too much for the babies. So I created a shade from cloth to go over them. That worked for 2023. Last year, no nests on the deck. But this year, they were rooting around again on the beam. Imagine my chagrin when a robin starting building a nest in a different section of the beam, with no shade cloth. I could already see her with her beak open on a warm sunny day. One day when she was gone from the nest, I counted three blue eggs.

So I tried a different solution. It was a bit of a risk, but I went out with a ladder and painted the ceiling above the nest with some white primer/paint. She had flown off when I got close, but after I finished she came back, and I am happy to say has continued to sit on the nest every day. I hope this helps her babies to thrive, as I wish for all babies to thrive. I am thinking of the babies in Gaza who are being starved right now.

Robin in nest with shade from painted ceiling

Another joy is that there is also a robin nesting in the bush near our front door. You can just barely see her from our living room windows–she is so well camouflaged from above. But she too is still sitting.

Spring is bursting all over. The cherry trees have some blossoms and the peach tree is starting too. I just hope all this rain we are getting this week doesn’t prevent them from being pollinated. The rain is much needed because of drought, but I miss the sunny days we had last week. I did a holistic spray for the trees the week before. Our trees struggled last year so I am trying to be more attentive this season.

Cherry blossoms against blue sky

Being in the garden is so healing in light of all the devastating news each day from our country, and from the world. One more photo of beauty, daffodils Margy picked from the garden. May the beauty be a prayer for peace.

yellow and orange multi-layered daffodils

Ephemeral

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Trout lilies are blooming near the brook.

There is so much beauty in the spring, but it all seems to be moving so fast. I can’t keep up. Mayday has come and gone. Already this season is half over. After two months of physical therapy for my hip and lower back, I am able to walk fifteen minutes and more again. The other day I walked to Capisic brook and onto the path nearby, and saw the trout lilies that usually grow there, a lovely spring ephemeral. American Heritage Dictionary defines ephemeral:

  1. Lasting for a markedly brief time.
  2. Having a short lifespan or a short annual period of aboveground growth. Used especially of plants.

Spring itself and all its beauty feels markedly brief. Is my love of photos a way of trying to hold on to all that is ephemeral? Is my need to write an attempt to halt the relentless flow of time?

I have been drawn outside more and more each day, excited to see daffodils and violets and green shoots coming up everywhere. And, happily, the peach tree is now covered with pink blossoms, and the cherry trees have many blossoms too. Last year, because of the weather, there were none–so these beauties seem fragile and extra special because of that vulnerability.

Peach blossoms on a foggy day.

There are many projects in the yard to attend to. Many branches fell from trees in the storms of winter and early spring. Margy has been cutting them up and hauling them around. Some of these we’re using to make a brush pile in the back corner for wildlife habitat. The other day, I cleared that space of invasive plants. I also set up our eight rain barrels again. We are going to get an new order of firewood, after using up our last old logs in the storms. So we are working on the space for the firewood, and purchased a rack to keep them off the ground.

Yesterday, I added two more pond lilies to the plants in the little pond, and as I was tidying up old dead shoots from other plants, I found strings of toad eggs attached to the old ferns. (So of course I left those.) We haven’t had toad eggs in the pond before. But there are a few frogs beginning to make an appearance–shy ones who have been diving under when they hear me approach.

The robins did not come back to the nest on our back porch that they had used for two years. Maybe that pair are no longer living. I read that their average life span in the wild may be just two years. I also read that they often don’t reuse nest sites–so we were lucky to have them in that spot for two years. Another ephemeral.

Then we discovered a nest in the yew bush near our front door–able to be partly seen from our living room window. So new robins are raising young nearby again. Maybe one of them fledged from the back porch.

Blue robins egg barely visible behind branches.

Is my love of photos a way of trying to hold on to all that is ephemeral? Is my need to write an attempt to halt the relentless flow of time?

I was cuddling with my cat Billie on the couch and suddenly felt a deep sense of our own impermanence. She is 13, I am 70. Senior cat, senior human. How much more time do we have? Someday, I won’t be able to feel her warm little body, with its soft fur and sweet smell, curling up on the pillow near my face. Someday, she will be gone; someday, I will be gone. We too are ephemeral. I want to hold on, but life seems to be about movement, about letting go into the next moment.

Snowy morning

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Snow coats every branch as the sun rises through the trees.

What a beautiful morning today! I took a little walk to the end of the block, where these photos are from. The road was icy, and I have a strange new pain in my ankle, so I didn’t want to try to get all the way to the brook near the school. But the brook also runs by the end of our street, and so that is where I saw it today. We are surrounded by various branches of Capisic Brook in our neighborhood, and it shapes the roads and layout and character of our neighborhood.

You can see the brook at the bottom of this photo, deep in the ravine.

I am grateful for the beauty of the snow on branches. I am grateful for the flowing of the brook. I am grateful for a new morning. I am grateful for a little walk. I am grateful for a neighbor who plows our driveway. I am grateful for the sun shining on white snow.

Photos help me see

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Three frogs on rocks near pond
Three frogs on rocks.

Since beginning to blog, I have loved taking photos of creatures and plants. It is like a third eye that helps me to see the beauty all around me. Sometimes it helps me to look more closely, later. Like with the frogs in our pond–I think these three might be bullfrogs, because of the ridge that goes behind their tympanum (their external ear drum for hearing), but not down their backs. I tried comparing them with images online, which helped, but then I noticed how often frogs have actually been misidentified in photos on the web. So I am not sure. They are bigger than some of the frogs that have been in the pond.

But when I look back to earlier photos of frogs that I identified as green frogs, I am confused. I knew those were green frogs because they were very small, and their little squeak as they dove into the water was distinctive. But they also seemed to have the ridge behind their ears and not always down their backs. Photos enable me to keep looking and wondering. I’ll have to wait and hear what these frogs sound like. They were out on those same rocks today.

Pink cosmos blooms
Pink cosmos blooms

Sometimes, photos help me see beauty that is ephemeral yet durable. This cosmos was a volunteer by the side of the road, and started tall, with just one blossom. In the winds of last weekend, it fell over, but it keeps blossoming, and the bees keep coming by for nectar. It just keeps on blooming. It makes me smile.

Then, the other morning these turkeys wandered into the orchard, the sun making a little halo around their funny heads and big bodies. I was sitting in my chair and saw them outside the window. So I jumped up to go outside to take photos. The camera motivates me to watch them on their travels through the back yard. Then I can enjoy them once again in the photos.

Turkeys with sun making halo around heads and bodies.
Turkeys in the morning.

Goodbye Old Pine

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Huge white pine tree trunk with three or four sections higher up, next to garage door on the left, white picket fence in front and other garage on the right.
The huge white pine tree next door was too tall to fit into one photo.

It was a sad day on July 6th when our neighbor’s huge pine tree was taken down. It had been the target of woodpeckers for a few years, so that was a sign that it was likely distressed–and in fact the tree company later confirmed the core had rotted. Situated so close to both our houses, our neighbor decided it was too dangerous to keep. But we were all sad to say goodbye too. It was a beautiful old pine.

Because of its position, the tree company needed to use our driveway to get access to the tree. I was amazed at the extent of the production. There were three huge trucks–one in the driveway with a crane to lift a worker to chainsaw the tree in huge sections. Another truck was parked and stabilized just off the street in our neighbor’s yard and used an even taller crane with a cable to carry these huge sections of branches and trunk over to the street. A third truck shredded smaller branches. At one point, I went outside to see what the biggest crane was doing, since from inside, it seemed it was lifting the huge logs right over the top of our house.

Blue sky, with tall crane and cable holding log, next to garage, trees in back.
Crane with cable lifts log up.
Blue sky, crane angled to the right over house with solar panels on roof, still carrying big log.
Crane swings over to bring log to the front of our house, to the street.

So it wasn’t actually carrying them right over the top of our house–more like around the edge of our house. Still, these were huge sections of the tree. And then the final section of the trunk was lifted up.

Huge trunk of pine hanging from cable
Huge trunk on its side in the street, with worker in yellow hard hat removing cabling. the width of the trunk comes up almost to his waist.
Worker removes the cabling from the trunk.

And then they were done, and the big logs moved to our neighbor’s front lawn to be later removed, and the trucks gone. It all happened in two hours. I’m glad that we are in less danger of a huge tree falling on our house in a big storm. In fact, we’ll also likely see more solar energy production, since the tree cast shade on our solar panels in the late afternoon. But I wanted to mark this passing, make room for the loss, and especially to remember the beauty of the pine.

Weather Report

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Close-up of white woman smiling into camera, with blue sun hat, sun glasses, and backdrop of ocean beach, with small figure looking out to sea.
Crescent Beach, Myke, with Margy in background.

A week ago we finally made it to the beach. We’ve had so many rainy days this summer, alternating with a few very hot muggy days. That day was hot and muggy, but less so at Crescent Beach, so we got ourselves over there. The water was totally full of seaweed, and somehow that dampened my enthusiasm for swimming, but the wading was lovely, and lying on a blanket in the sand. I’m smiling in the selfie, but this post is more about the challenges of this summer.

It feels like a summer in which it is very hard to love the earth, or to feel loved by the earth. It is hard to even go outside! According to the weather report for Maine, June had only 7 days without rain. And July the rainy patterns have continued. But what makes it worse is that the days without rain have gone to the opposite extreme of muggy and hot. I don’t think we’ve had even one dry, sunny, moderately warm day. The other challenge has been air quality–many days of smoke particles making their way from Canada–not to an extreme, but enough to bump the meter from “good” to “moderate”.

And I have to acknowledge that we’ve been lucky here. No flash flooding of town centers, like in Vermont this week. No over-100-degree heat for days on end like in Arizona. No forest fires on our doorstep. But still…

I’ve been feeling like a failure in my deep intention to build relationship with the earth. It’s not that the garden is doing so badly (except for maybe the cherry tree). It is just that I feel unable to tend to it, unable to even sit outside and appreciate it. (The cherry tree needs some attention because of, perhaps, black cherry aphids and sooty mold.) If I manage to do one small garden thing in a day, I count that as gain. For example, the other day, I put some tulle netting over the ripening blueberry plants.

Tulle fabric spread over blueberry bush, with raindrops, berries starting to ripen.

I do try to walk around for ten minutes in the morning if I can. But none of it feels like the nurture that the garden had been for me during the last several years. Instead I feel a vague sense of overwhelm, I feel uncomfortable in my body, I feel grief and deep weariness.

And the truth is, because of climate change, because of the destructiveness of our larger society, we are all facing unimaginable loss, we are all facing a time of unknowable earth transformation that may lead to our doom. With this looming around us, no wonder these small weather challenges feel so overwhelming.

So today I am making space for that overwhelm, for grief, for rest. But even in the midst of those feelings, there are parts of the garden that still seemed determined to bring beauty to my eyes. I look out the front window, and the roadside garden is now awash in yellow heliopsis flowers and day lilies. They brighten even a gray day.

Yellow heliopsis flowers all over the roadside garden.

No smoke here right now…

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purple and pale lavender spiderwort blossoms in spiky green leaves, with rain drops clinging to leaves
Spiderwort blossoms after rain

We’ve had two weeks of very cool rainy weather, and that counter-clockwise low pressure weather system has kept away the wildfire smoke from Canada, while folks to our south are facing orange skies and unsafe air. Still, we’ve paid attention, following the news, and thinking about what might happen if it does come our way. It is easy enough for Margy and I to stay inside, or wear our N95 masks outside.

But now that we are deeper in relationship with our land, I am anxious about how such bad air might affect the robins and frogs and squirrels and other critters who live here with us. They don’t have masks and can’t get inside. I wonder if the babies of these critters wouldn’t make it, so vulnerable in those first weeks of life. My heart is wide open to our little microcosm of earth life.

And yet it is the macrocosm that emerges most in this story, because the smoke is coming from far away in Quebec, from wildfires made more destructive by climate change. We aren’t alone in our microcosm, we are all connected by the winds that blow across the globe, undeterred by artificial boundaries. I have been somewhat removed from wildfire problems. I have seen them on the news in California, Alberta, Australia. This is the first time they have come close to where I live. But truly we are all more and more vulnerable. And of course, some much more vulnerable than others. I worry about people without houses, struggling just to survive, in a tent or with a tarp. They can’t get out of the bad air.

There is so little I can personally do about these large issues at this time in my life. That is some of my motivation for trying to tend our little garden–to love this small place of earth in hopes that more and more people can learn to love the larger earth, our great mother. To share the beauty of this earth in writings and photos on this blog, that beauty might inspire love. But love includes grief, and the more we love the earth, the more we grieve for the destruction that human beings are perpetrating.

Irises in bloom, purple, with hints of paler purple and yellow.
Irises in bloom

Roadside Garden Flowers

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Roadside garden with siberian iris purple flowers, turkish rocket yellow flowers, lupine purple flowers.
Siberian iris, turkish rocket, lupines in bloom.

This is my favorite time of year for the roadside garden. The flowers are in contrasting colors of bright yellow, purple/blue, and white, with lovely green leaves of all shapes and sizes. Despite the cold and rain of the past week, it seems to send off a glow into the gloom. It was a garden formed originally from gifted hardy perennials, and others have naturalized to find their own places, like the white daisies.

Yellow flowers of turkish rocket, purple Siberian irises, daisies, in front of rain slicked pavement road.
Turkish rocket, Siberian iris, wild daisies in bloom.

Before the rain, we planted random and unknown flower seeds in one of the garden beds in the front, and carrot seeds in the other (next to broccoli seedlings). I had also planted zucchini and cucumber seeds in the hugelkultur mound. I hope the rain waters them gently and they sprout. Most of our seeds are from prior years, so it is a gamble. But it did seem like good timing.

And for those who have been following this blog, you might be delighted to learn that after the robins fledged, the parents are now starting a second batch of eggs. Once again, she laid one egg per day, but this time, there are four!

Four blue robin's eggs in nest

Roadside Garden

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Roadside garden strip with green spikey leaves coming up, yellow flowered turkish rocket, and wood chips between plants, plus a broken wood log.

The last couple days I have been sprucing up the roadside strip in front of our house. I had left all the leaves and old dead plant droppings all spring, better for soil enrichment and habitat for insects. The hardy perennials have been greening up, and the turkish rocket is flowering now. I think of this as my no-work garden, and mostly just leave it alone. But two days ago I pulled up crabgrass, and then I have been adding fresh wood chips between plants and along the roadway. We just got a huge pile of wood chips from our favorite tree guy. Such an excellent and free resource!

I’ve also been watching the Chelsea Flower Show on Britbox, and maybe that inspired me to put some odd shaped logs in a few empty spaces between plants. An ornamental crabapple tree fell in a storm last winter, and our neighbor cut it up for us. Some of it can be seasoned for our wood stove, and I have been moving those to our wood pile. But some pieces are just the wrong size–but apparently they are perfect for garden decor. I can see this view above from our front living room window, and it makes me so happy!

Roadside garden with green spikey leaves, next to paved road, neighbors car in the background.

I also like that it now looks a bit prettier for the neighbors. I want folks to realize that wildlife friendly, organic, permaculture gardens can be beautiful too! In fact, someone walking by commented about how much they like our gardens. I hope we may be contributing to a trend. Our neighbors across the street just put in some raised beds in their front yard, and our neighbors to the side were getting heat pumps installed yesterday.

Finally, the other blooming plant right now is a blue mountain cornflower. I only wish I’d put it on the sidewalk side, because we can’t see it from the house. Maybe I’ll move it next year.

Mountain cornflower, or perennial bachelor button, with purplish blue flowers, green stems and leaves.

Robin Excitement

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Two baby robin heads peaking up from the nest, under a white beam.
Robins peaking over the edge of the nest!

What could be better than to watch baby robins venturing over the nest? Yesterday we saw their little heads popping up and then hiding back down in the nest. Today, they were out of the nest, onto the beam next to it! It is actually two beams with a lower beam between, so they can hide down and lift up there too. They are beginning to try out their wings, and explore the length of the beam. Still clamoring for food from parent! Their reddish color is starting to show. I wonder how long until they flutter a bit further. Can’t be long now.

Two robin heads facing forward, peaking over the edge of a white beam, next to the nest.
Robins peaking over the edge of the beam, out of the nest!
Two baby robins beaks up, one with worm, on beam, parent robin on nest to right.
Parent robin on the nest, babies next to it, eager, one has got the worm.
Baby robin folding its wings, while sibling looks on from the right.
Trying out the wings!