Category Archives: rural doctor

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Daily Evil: Y is for Yellow

Yellow can mean fear or cowardice, but it is also a color. Sunlight, summer, warmth, daffodils, spring and tulips.

This watercolor by Helen Burling Ottaway is from 1999 and my daughter chose the mat. I love her choice, the orange picking up all the oranges and yellows in the painting. Orange would never occur to me, but it is wonderful.

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Goal achieved!

I am Elwha, cat.

I achieved an item from my bucket list today! My first prey!

I am in the cat cage in the wild outside. Mother opens the window some days. It has been cold and wet, but I go out anyhow. This time I see movement. I freeze and slowly stalk it. My hunt is successful and I make my catch. I squeeze through the door and carry it to the kitchen.

I put it down. I hope it will run, but it is slow. Still alive, though. Mother notices and admires it. I would let her eat it. She doesn’t take it.

Mother is proud, too. I hear her tell the phone “Elwha caught his first worm!”

I taste the worm but I am not that hungry. I left it but it was gone later. Maybe mother got hungry after all.

I bet I can catch more for her!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: bucket list.

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Daily Evil: V is for Virago

Virago gives positive and negative definitions, but all female. The most positive ones are of a very strong woman, “like a man”. Is there a male word that means the same thing? A word for a man, where the most positive one is that he’s very strong, “like a woman”. Perhaps “like a woman in labor”. Let’s make one up if we can’t think of one. “Obstetico”, perhaps. A man who complains like he’s a woman in labor, but the positive definition is strong like a woman in labor.

This is a watercolor postcard. Helen Burling Ottaway painted a bunch of postcards, with wonderful detail. These snapdragons could be viragos or obstetricos or perhaps both. This is from 1999, two years into her ovarian cancer. So the song is the Bald Headed Blues.

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After the bear

I visited an old friend in Europe last March. I talked about the Olympic Peninsula and he was impressed with the cougars and orcas and bears. “We don’t have any large predators here.” Well, only humans.

They used to, though. This is from a local museum: a bear skeleton from about 7000 BC from the country. A very big bear fossil. There were other fossil predators including a wolf like creature.

So this is the succession where he lives: humans living after the bears.

What comes next?

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: succession.

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Daily Evil: U is for Unlikely

Unlikely isn’t evil. Well, I am tired of evil, so U is for Unlikely because I am tossing in a monkey wrench. U for unexpected, too.

Back to etchings: U is for Unicorn. This is titled “The Virgin and the Unicorn II”, number 10/75, 1986, H. Ottaway. The etching is 7 inches by 8 inches and the paper is 11 inches by 15 inches. She would often frame them mounted but not matted, in frames that have a slot to hold the glass away from the picture. She did her own framing and especially disliked cutting glass. I knew when a show was close because she would be framing and grumpy.

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Daily Evil: T is for Thief

Time is the evil thief I am thinking of today. This is my sister, Christine Robbins Ottaway, painted by Helen Burling Ottaway in the early 1970s. Time has stolen both of them.

This is another watercolor, over a pencil drawing, 10.5 inches by 14 inches.

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Rock surfaces

Happy Earth Day!

I walked North Beach twice this week and Marrowstone Island once so far this week. This is from North Beach yesterday. This rock makes me a little anxious because I think it will come down. It’s well above my head and is probably 5 feet by 5 feet. Bits of the cliffs fall and I do not want to be under them.

There is another, a little smaller, a bit further along. Those are not small trees on the top of the cliffs, so the scale becomes clearer.

Another of the huge rocks has been on the beach for a while. Look who is living on the surface, while the tides roll in and out. An amazing surface, right?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: surface.

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Refusing to yearn

Today I refuse categorically to yearn
I miss stupid things: that you rise early too
still this morning it’s annoying to learn
no one to talk to at the hour of stupid, no you
Impatient with my feelings, I wish you ill
hope you wake and want to whine and moan
hope you wake early and feel over the hill
but have to be quiet and grouse all alone
hope your mind buzzes like a hive of grumpy bees
while you spy on the internet and feel superior
hope you gather more facts piled like logged trees
and wonder why the piles don’t make you merrier
I hope you slowly open and become aware
you think you know everything and nobody cares

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Sol Duc is playing a game alone, capturing her back foot with her front, claws out on both. When she realizes I am watching, she puts her head down and pretends to be asleep. She isn’t asleep, I can tell by the claws and the ear tilt.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: yearn.