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Another celebration of summer poem, this one by ee cummings:

Untitled

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of allnothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e.e. cummings, from Xaipe, 1950

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Perhaps my subtitle to this post should be “Rich discovers the macro feature on his long lens”. Life is in the details, so here are some things that perhaps you wouldn’t ordinarily see…or find interesting.

Let me state for the record: I hate yellow jackets. I know that God made them to have purpose in the world (read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_jacket if you don’t believe me), but that doesn’t change my general loathing of their hard little yellow and black bodies, not to mention their unfailing, terminally ornery dispositions. Ergh.

However. Look at this and tell me it’s not beautiful:

My little sister once made the mistake of taking pity on a wet bumble bee. “Poor bumble! . . . . . . OW! Momeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” She was younger then than she is now, but I’m sure she remembers that Ms. Bumble did not take kindly to being picked up.

This one caught my eye because of the contrast in colors. I have no idea what he/she is, but interesting looking anyways:

OK, maybe I could have left this one out…. Man, thing looks like an alien. I wonder what it will be when it grows up? Anyone know? Suzie my bug-ologist cousin?

We managed to abscond with most of the Asian lillies we had planted in Ann Arbor. Man are these awesome flowers! Powerful visually, powerful olfactorily (is that a word?)

And here endeth the lesson on macro photography. Heheh.

One of the views from the Arbor…see the hummingbird?

Ah, just kidding. There’s no hummingbird there. How long did you spend looking?

And here are our Deer Friends. Just like Bambi…or something.

They sure are cute, though.

There is something about hummingbirds.

I can honestly say that until recently I had a couple of “was that a hummingbird?!” experiences under my belt in all the time I have spent out of doors these 35 years.

Well.

My parents sent a hummingbird feeder (probably last Christmas?) which we recently hung out in the arbor on the north side of the house. Actually, we hung it about a month ago, but I think it has taken the hummingbird community that long to come to terms with the bright blue bauble. Not that I can blame them…it doesn’t look much like a flower to me either. Well, now they’ve found it, and it takes them collectively no more than 3 days to drain it. We have become a veritable sugar water factory! Look out Coca Cola…

The arbor at is an idyllic space. It has half a dozen very happily flowering hanging plants, a border of lush, dark green, waist-high Boxwoods, two folding chairs, a small table, a stone bench, a floor of brick and crushed stone, and….a hoary old air conditioning unit sticking up out of the ground. Well, nothing’s perfect.

We hung the hummingbird feeder in the arbor and watched for quite some time. Finally, I spent a whole morning in the arbor with my camera and was rewarded for my patience with the delightful company of three of these diminutive creatures. Two males doing battle for this very valuable new territory (thus the title of this post) and a female. My favorite thing that I’ve discovered in these new companions: the anticipation of their arrival is as much the fun as the enjoyment of their company.

Something about these little birds lifts the spirit (even when they are batting at each other with their wings) and I’ll be confounded if I can explain just exactly why.

Here comes the first one to check out the scene. He makes a bee-line for the arbor from a quarter mile away, and your eye is drawn by the flash of speed. At the very end of his approach, as he slows to assess the situation, his wings make a “brrrrrr-rup” sound that you almost feel as much as hear.

As he hovers, he makes hardly any sound at all. Flits around, checks things out from several different angles. Tiny little vocalizations: “chitchit……….chit……..chit……….chitchit”

Then, blissful contact:

Once he’d had his first drink, he zoomed off to the neighboring crab apple tree to make sure that all was still safe:

Sorry it’s so blurry, but this is using my long lens and magnifying the results quite a bit. I was not using a tripod, and as good as my hands are (ahem) you still get some lens shake at that distance.

These next three images needed some adjustment and also a great deal of magnification. They were originally quite backlit…but I liked the effect so I included them.

Approach…

A little closer…

Contact!

And then, just as soon as they’d come, “brrrrrrrrrrrrroooooo” and they were gone, like little green and brown bullets, dwindling to nothing in the distance.

I hope you enjoyed these as much as I enjoyed taking them.

There’s something about hummingbirds…

June is always a big month for my family. My little sister was born on June 10th, my grandmother was born on June 9th, she and her husband were married back in 1947 (? I think?) on June 11th. Not to mention that my great-grandmother (my mother’s mother’s mother) was also born in June. Well, whether or not I have all the dates exactly right, the fact remains that many of my important people have and have had many important events during June.

This particular June, June 2005, my dear grandma Danielson turned 80. Betty June Danielson. Yeah, no kidding. Given that her husband just passed away in February of 2004, that her mother passed away during the fall of 2003 ( ! ) at the age of 106, it seemed fitting that the family have a great big bash to celebrate her landmark birthday. As my mother said to her cousins, “we’ve only seen each other at funerals lately. Why don’t you all come over for Mom’s birthday?”

Thus, the third week of June found Karen and myself in our trusty Honda CRV, tooling along the long road that is Interstate 80 to make 600 miles between Milford and Mendham go away. This time, however, we decided that we’d make a few forays into rural Pennsylvania along the way. As a matter of fact, most of PA both going and coming back was on little two lane highways. Having done my stint at college here at The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, I got well acquainted with doing the back and forth commute along Route 80. So well acquainted, in fact, that I would be just as happy to never drive its wide bitumen again.

Sadly, our overwhelming impression of PA during this time was of grand cities and lovely little well appointed towns whose industry had left them gathering dust, rust and the grime of history.

Grand old rail stations, steel mills, hotels, oil fields……..and vacant (more…)