Tag: photos

Midsummer

It’s a beautiful day and about as midsummerish as it can get, so I hopped on the bicycle for a little tour down some country roads. I thought I’d pedal to the river, just beyond the neighbor’s farm.

I’m a retired miner, not a farmer, so I don’t even know what crop this is. Maybe canola? All I know is that these fields are much easier on the eyes now than when they were covered in snow drifts.

At the river, I took a little breather as I had pedaled about 5 miles, and I’m no spring chicken. It’s very beautiful there, and someone had carved out a nice little campsite in the trees.

There aren’t any farms by the woods, so I didn’t know if these guinea hens were wild, or if they just wandered a long way from home. It looks like God spent so much time on those star-spangled feathers, he just squeezed a head on them and left it at that.

As I was getting back on the bike to ride home, I almost stepped on what Emily Dickinson referred to as a “narrow fellow in the grass”. He put a little damper on my midsummer bike ride; I truly do not like snakes!

I stood there awhile, taking it all in: the smells, the sights, and sounds; it was paradise, for sure, but it brought to mind a quote by Iris Watts that summed up the moment:

“The trouble with paradise

Is that there’s always

A snake in the grass.”

–Photos by me

On the Road Again

We may never know why the chicken crossed the road, but here’s a few possible motives for some other animals:

The bear barrels across it to find better berries.

The deer flies across the road to escape the deer flies.

The snake slithers across the road to shed its skin.

The hare hops across the road to habitate more holes.

Though they each cross the road for different reasons and with different modes of locomotion, they all have one common goal in mind: to get to the other side without encountering man. Could that go for chickens, too?

–Photos by aaron and me

Shot of the Day 6/24/22

Lil Blue Eyes was the saddest fawn I’d ever seen. She’d barely had time to dry off in this world when her mama crossed paths with modern civilization on the highway and left her to the wolves. Luckily, she was rescued by my farmer friend, who took her home and introduced her to all the barnyard denizens on her farm. Amazingly, she was befriended by all. Her family now includes many horses and their foals, dozens of cats and dogs, and one very fat-but-friendly hog. The sadness seems to be lifting.

–Photos by me

Turtles

I was out on a bicycle ride yesterday when I came upon a huge, mossy-backed snapping turtle on the side of the road. It was obvious that she was laying a clutch of eggs–right there, inches from the busy highway! I would have wagged my finger at her for such wanton indiscretion, but she could’ve snapped it off like a twig, so I kept my distance. Very few of the typical hundred or so turtle hatchlings survive as it is, but these will literally be left by the side of the road. It seems strange to me, but turtles have been around for a couple hundred million years, so they must be doing something right.

Whenever I run into a turtle, it reminds me of that anecdote about a science teacher who was explaining the physics of the earth in space to his class, when one of the students stood up and said that the earth rests on the back of a great turtle. When asked by the teacher what that turtle rests on, the student replied, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

–Photos by me