many colored

The tree colors this year have been amazing! I think it is because the rain started late. I hope all the trees survive. I watered mine and thanked them and said I hoped they would stay. I say “mine” but I just live here. The trees were here before me and I hope after as well.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day.

Tulip 3

For Cee’s FOTD.

I pay for a whole 9 months of CSA, community supported agriculture, from Red Dog Farm. Early in the season my box has vegetables and tulips! I love the tulips, they are gorgeous.

I have been in a CSA for most of the last 22 years. People say, but you do not pick what you get. I say, I know, but I hate throwing food out so I end up eating MORE vegetables then if I bought them.

Red Dog Farm: https://reddogfarm.net/.

Spring, summer, fall

I visit my friend Amy in Portland. We are friends from medical school at the Medical College of Virginia, now VCU, Richmond, Virginia.

Her mother is Nancy Clough and lives nearby. Amy’s house is surrounded by bronze sculptures, because Nancy Clough works in bronze and pottery.

This series is in Nancy’s house. She says that she sold winter and needs to pour another. More than one set is out there.

I love the joy in these sculptures.

Years ago I bought a vase from Nancy Clough, when I was visiting Amy on the west coast. I still have that vase and now a new one, from this trip. I bought the smallest vase back years ago, because it was all that I could afford. My mother was an artist, so I know how much it means to artists to have people buy their work. And anyhow, I love the flowers on the vase.

I tried googling her and find her on LinkedIn. She can be reached regarding her sculptures, just message me. I want to photograph more of the sculptures in the yard, so I will have to plan another trip. Heads up, Amy, I am coming back.

Dinosaur dreams

Dinosaur Dreams

The problem
With Intelligent Design
Is those old bones
Those dinosaurs

Also that of 10,000 dreams of creation
One would be right
And the followers of all the others
Consigned to hell
If so, I go gladly, clutching
Dinosaur bones to my chest
And will enjoy the diversity
Not the narrow heaven with a narrow
Small-minded deity

But is evolution right?

Well, I think it’s on the right track

But wholly done and all correct?

After all, think how often
Medicine has been wrong
Think of tobacco and vioxx
Think of Galen, over 2000 years ago
Thinking that evil humors built up in the uterus
Causing hysteria
External pelvic massage was the cure
For over 2000 years
For old maids, widows and nuns
Who had no male to cleave unto
Massage was a treatment into the early 1900s
And now we wonder about prozac too

Evolution is an evolving science

I think of when my son was four
And he watched “Jurassic Park”
Against my wishes
Because I thought it was too violent
He studied it carefully many times

One day he asked me, anxiously,
“Mom, is DNA real?”
To check that it wasn’t another of those Santa stories
I was able to reassure him
Yes, I think DNA is real
He was pleased

A few days later he announced
That when he grows up
He wants to be a plant and animal scientist
Extract DNA from amber
And grow those dinosaurs

A laudable ambition
For any four year old

If God left the dinosaur bones
Around to fool us
And they never lived
She has a nasty sense of humor
And my son and I will not forgive

I believe in evolution
And dream of dinosaurs

written in 2009

freezing level

Yesterday a trip to Forks is in order. There is snow around Lake Crescent and you can see the freezing level part way up the mountain. It is beautiful as we rise into the pass between the Elwha Valley and the Sol Duc Valley. In the Sol Duc Valley there is less snow at road level, but it’s still in the mountains. A gorgeous day.

In the Sol Duc Valley.

Makeup

Poem: Makeup

For a fellow blogger and for the Ragtag Daily Prompt: Still. I am thinking of both stillness and of still photography. A photograph. For a still, I think that it is usually posed. I like taking portraits when people are not posed.