Category Archives: tree

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No mosquitoes

Do they really have toes? I don’t know. Probably, tiny insect toes to hold on.

I still have a daisy blooming outside in spite of weather dropping below freezing off and on for a week. We had snow flurries, but further out in the county, they got inches of snow. Port Townsend is in on the Quimper Peninsula, sticking out from the Olympic Peninsula, so all that water gives us a different microclimate.

This is the second year for my “Christmas stick”. I put it up last year because I had these two kittens tearing things apart.

First I need to get the stick to stand. I had a bare stick, with the angel on top, for a week.

Then I cut four branches from the huge tree in my yard and added them to the stick.

The cats wondered, but this year they are not knocking it over so far. I put up lights and decorations yesterday. Not the glass ones: paper and soft ones. Because I’m not sure about the cats.

The cats still aren’t sure about it. We tend not to have a lot of mosquitoes even in summer, partly because the wind often howls up my street. The mosquitoes are blown inland. Too cold right now.

Happy Christmas stick!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: mosquito.

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Lit

That moment after the tree is taken down
not from greed but because the trunk has split
dangerous operation; all survive
Even the tree. A split 20 foot trunk may survive.
We won’t know until spring.
You are hunting in the sections that are down.
“Yes!” you say and hold them up.
“Invaders. They’re not native.
I shoot them when they steal the birdseed.
They crawl into the trunk to die.”
You hold a shriveled carcass up with each leather glove.
They too look like leather or shrunken heads.
Your smile lit up
at this evidence of your successful aim:
killing squirrels.

I think this is my first ekphrastic poem. Inspiring photograph, right? So that makes me laugh, it’s so gruesome. I was looking for a photograph for the Flower of the Day and came across this. Taken in January 2022.

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Living together

Lichen are a lifeform formed from algae and fungi, which is amazing. Apparently they join forces when they can’t survive on their own and form a different creature. And it’s not just one kind of algae or one kind of fungi, but lots of them! I am reading Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures, by Merlin Sheldrake. It’s really quite amazing. I love science, it opens up the world!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: lichen.