Asakiyume mita

When we went to the Amazon in July, I took this photo of a banyan, also known as an arbol caminante, or walking tree, because of how it spreads. The water was low at this point--you can see the ground beneath the tree.



Now here are some banyans in March, when the water was much higher. You can no longer see the ground! But you can also see the high-water mark--that's how much higher the water will rise.



( I promised some pictures of me in a banyan... )

We went in a canoe with no motor, just paddles, for this trip into the flooded forest. R and L, my husband-and-wife guide team, took up the paddles, and I felt too colonialist "explorer" for words and said, "I can do some paddling," and R said, "Oh you have a job. It's to scoop out the water as it seeps in."

This was my scoop:


(This job was not very demanding.)

There were beautiful flowers...





From time to time R made a loud "oump! oump!" call.

"What are you calling?" I asked.

"Cayman," he said.

But who answered was not a cayman but an unseen fisherman. L giggled.

We saw a sloth! And then both R and L whistled for it. Apparently female sloths whistle (or scream) to attract a mate.

More flooded forest...





And the flooded coast

Please enjoy the flying friend on the right-hand side of the picture, coming in for a landing (you can click through to see the photo larger and catch all the details)



And the many many creatures enjoying the nectar of this magnificent bloom

The mail brought a welcome item--my uncorrected proof for LAGOONFIRE!



I must go through it carefully and root out typos! The Polity approves of rooting out errors.

Last book featured a deity who wasn't ready to be retired. This one features a bunch of retired gods. How do they spend their time? How does the Polity treat them? You can learn a lot about a government by how it treats its decommissioned deities.

I've been spending too much time just working, but when I'm not, I step outside to enjoy the cosmos ... by which I mean the flower called cosmos, but hey, it's part of the bigger cosmos, so both things, actually.



Seems like each blossom held its own bee:


By the time I got those photos, late-ish today, the bees all seemed to be sleeping, but this morning they were active, flying blossom to blossom, but always politely socially distancing when they saw a blossom was already occupied.

It's past 5 pm, local time. Have an autumn brew.

It's a drought here, and there's a water ban. Grass lawns are burned gold except where trees shade them---there they're still green. (I don't have much of a grass lawn: mine is a lot of thyme and clover and hawkweed and sorrel. Where I have grass, it's the same as everyone else's.)

I went for a walk this morning under a drifting gray sky and saw many good things. I didn't have a camera so you'll have to bear with words. I saw the red-winged blackbird royalty, the princes with their scarlet epaulets and gold fringe, and their wives, more drab but just as territory-proud. I saw elderflowers and, on the corner where I always see it at this time of year, tiny bindweed flowers. At the community garden I saw a flock of goldfinches, which my sister says is called a charm--a charm of goldfinches--perching on tomato stakes and then flying off in their rising-dipping flight, like needles through cloth.

Across the street is the highway department, where, at 7 am, they were having, apparently, a convocation of orange Asplundh bucket trucks, maybe/probably to cut tree branches from around utility wires around town. Highway department employees were in fluorescent green t-shirts and jackets, like firefighters. I saw one guy arriving, hurrying out of his car.
"Is it bucket truck day today?" I asked.
"You bet," he said.

Along the way, I saw chipmunks, which dashed off under the Virginia creeper and poison ivy. One was so tiny, the size of a mouse instead of a rat.
"How did you get so tiny?" I asked, and then began thinking about if you could grow small instead of big.

I keep on meaning to do a real post but work keeps keeping me down. But only four more weeks now, yay!

Anyway, you'll be happy to know that today the cinderblock from last post had two beautiful flower bouquets, sitting on top of it. The rainbow-colored umbrella had blown into the road, so I stopped my car and retrieved it, and doing so, realized I couldn't see any way to pay for the bouquets. There probably is one? I didn't look hard. Or maybe the flowers are being offered for free. (But probably not ... that's the sort of assumption I make that is usually *wrong*).

The following photos are unrelated to the cinderblock, the bouquets, and the umbrella. The first is sunflowers; the second is the dappled path between the sunflowers.

The Ashley reservoir is now one of my go-to places to take people when they visit. I took my old college friend and her husband there, and learned that the water-loving plant that I had thought looked very mangrove-y is buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), which grows up and down the Atlantic coast and as far inland as the Mississippi, and is indeed a species in the mangrove biome!

Buttonbush



Yesterday I took osprey_archer there (and we read aloud to each other--so much fun), and lo and behold, the buttonbush was in bloom! I didn't have a camera, so she obliged me with a photo:

Buttonbush in flower, by osprey_archer



The flowers look like how pollen looks under a scanning electron microscope:

Buttonbush flowers....



Pollen, much magnified:



(source)

Or, um... like an influenza virus...



(source)

It smells nice, though, and bees and butterflies love it. AS DO I.

The flowers are wearing flower crowns these days, and going dancing:


What better thing to do as midsummer approaches?

The last time I walked this way, a truck was pulled up onto the sandy shore at the edge of the sea of meadow grass. A guy was lying beside, and sort of under, the truck. I think I saw tools under there--no doubt he was repairing something--but I kind of imagined maybe there was a lunch under there too? He was on his cell phone. Maybe he was consulting about the truck's problem. Or maybe he was just chatting with someone as he took his ease, sheltered from the road by his truck, looking out over the ripping grass and wildflowers.


And speaking of trucks, look at the magnificent truck on this now-empty bottle of tea:



I think I may use it for a message in a bottle. And speaking of bottles for messages, I offered tiny decorated message-bottles as an extra incentive for time_shark's Kickstarter for Clockwork Phoenix 5, and it funded! And I have only three decorated bottles to hand, so needed to get a few more. Easily accomplished. Here is today's roadside haul:



Now I'll just wash them, and soon I'll be decorating.

By the way, Clockwork Phoenix 5 is open to submissions, so go ye forth and submit!

It's a bouquet of shades and textures. The old-man's-beard and the milkweed are so soft; the amaranth-like stuff is prickly, some of the others are scratchy.



Come closer

There are galaxies, many many galaxies, forming a bobbing, swaying screen between my backyard and my front. These galaxies smell like honey, and I push through them to get down to the laundry line or the compost bin.

But seriously, don't the umbels of queen anne's lace . . .



. . . look like galaxies?



galaxies . . . I wonder if they smell like honey.

I was wishing I could make a scent recording of the route from my home to the supermarket. You'd get the fresh, sweet-light scent of long grass, and then the cloying, overpowering scent of the Russian olives in bloom, and then a whiff of creosote, as I passed a telephone pole, and then the sharp, rich smell of the mulch heaped around the bushes by the supermarket.

If I took a sound recording on the same journey, then as I walked along the boardwalk through the marsh, you'd hear--without fail--a frantic robin fly up from under the boardwalk. She's made a nest down there, and every time I walk along the boardwalk, she flies away in a panic. I hope she doesn't have high blood pressure or PTSD by the time she's done incubating her eggs.

The thing is, she's actually quite safe from anyone or anything on the boardwalk--it would take some doing to get off the boardwalk, go underneath it, and find her nest.

. . . Today, though, I walked the other direction, in search of mugwort (found!). I didn't have my camera, but I did have my cell phone (very unusual for me to have my cell phone w/me, but today I did), so here is a cell phone photo of star-of-bethlehem wildflowers.