Asakiyume mita

For the daily prompt thing I'm doing, I ended up going down a rabbit hole about windmill sails and came across this story of a miller who restored the last of what used to be many windmills--"the highest concentration of windmills in the Iberian peninsula"--on a mountain in Portugal. Here he is with his windmill in 2019:


Photo by Maria Rebelo Photography; resized from the image at the blog post

He's using the mill to grind ancient wheat grains; he says ants prefer wheat grains that don't have pesticides.

Oh, and those clay pots hanging on the arms of the windmill? They are each tuned to a note in the key of C Major, and you can hear what they sound like in this soundcloud file.

I was driving to the high school yesterday, and anytime I passed a wet, low-lying area, the cheerful sound of spring peepers rose from it. Not only water, but also frog song, collects there. It was as if the scene were a giant coloring book, and someone had colored in the sounds, filling in the low spots with peepers. So then I got to thinking about how else the scene was colored, aurally. The roads are colored with the sounds of engines. If the picture is colored in the early morning, the roads are dark with that sound--people heading to work. At midday, there's only the hint of car sound--much paler. In the woods, the upper trees are colored with the calls of flickers, chickadees, and cardinals. The meadow is colored in with the sounds red-winged blackbirds and kildeer.

Have a picture of a wet, low-lying area.

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.