Author: Eudora Watson

I am a writer, poet, teacher who loves the natural world, photographing insects, and spending times with dogs. You can see some of my photos of insects on bugguide.net and my writing and photos of insects and dogs on my blog and my Substack newsletter. I'd rather laugh than not, and rather dance than almost anything else.

Car Show Fever

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Years ago my car broke down when I was far from home, and I bought an old 55 Chevy to get me back. What a car – all I have left of it is the hood ornament, but I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for the 55 Chevy ever since. I cruised around the local annual car show today till I found one -with that great airplane riding the hood.

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Of course, there were many, many pretty cars to see today. The way they are lined up, sometimes the best photo ops at car shows are the rear end shots . . .

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And sometimes the line up makes for quirky, fun match ups. I like to think of these two at a stop light together, revving engines . . .

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I’ve had a couple of great cars myself – a Dodge Dart (pre-1976: that engine would still be going if the body hadn’t rusted off), a 55 Chevy (with that airplane!) and a car whose make I can’t remember, but it was sporty and fast and lasted more years than anyone guessed it would. When it went, it left me high and dry and I bought an old Lincoln Town Car in a pinch. But that’s more stories than I counted on for a quick post, I’ll end there.

What about you? What cars are you fond of?

What does Spring look like?

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When I signed up in January to take two online writing classes back-to-back, 10 weeks straight of weekly reading and writing deadlines, I thought, “This will take me right through Winter and into Spring!” The last due date was yesterday, and here’s this morning’s view of the path through the backfield. Blog_March 26 2018 Snowy walk

That black dog in the first photo is Gudgeon. He doesn’t much like the very cold temperatures, but this version of snow is a favorite. It has softened during the sunny days, then firmed up over night: he can walk on top of it and flop for a good back rub.

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Then he’s ready for a walk . . .

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What I’ve Been Reading

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I’ve sometimes been guilty of explaining why I’m not currently reading a book by joining the club that claims, “too busy,” or “too tired at the end of the day.” I like my life better when I’m explaining, instead, why I read so much. When I was  kid, I was a ‘bookworm’ and nothing more needed to be said about why I chose the company of books over people, why I carried a book with me when I climbed the tree in the back yard, or why I stayed up late reading a book by flashlight after bedtime.

When I taught 8th graders, I had an excuse for gobbling down several MG and YA books a week – I needed to read widely so I had many books to choose from when a student needed a recommendation. I always told my students who said they didn’t like to read that they just hadn’t met the right book yet, and then I’d stack a bunch up – pulling them from my extensive classroom collection of paperbacks – and give them the advice to read the first page or so, and when they wanted to keep going, they’d found their book.

But my teaching focus now is writing, and even though I believe reading and writing can’t be divorced from each other, they have drifted apart in my professional life and, by no coincidence, I suppose, in my personal life. So, to bring reading back into focus for me, I’ll share here thoughts on the books I’m reading now.

Open House by Patricia J. Williams

Unfailingly sharp witted and generous, Williams combines her close observations of life, injustice, joy, and expensive take-out with her ability to pull back, always, to the big picture and to ways of making meaning that we can move forward with. Her story-telling carries, for me, faint undertones of the potential for a lecture, but the best kind of lecture – one in which you are given new information by being given new ways to think about things, with never once being crowded into a box of the author’s own making. Never preachy, always on point, this slim volume, subtitled, “Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own” is a treat.

The Meadow

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DSC_1031The quarry man bought the old house and its acreage, scraped the topsoil off the meadow, and sold off the house with two acres of the meadow and its partial border of trees and shrub. In the house, a bathroom went in, and in a child’s room, a fat rainbow – floor to ceiling to floor – was sketched out and painted.

For thirty years, owners kept the meadow mowed. Between mowings, grasses grew, and golden rod, oyster plants, milkweed, and asters. Each late fall the meadow’s summer growth lay itself down, and in that flattened landscape the old disc harrow, stranded in its long-gone farmer’s field, reappeared.

Twenty years ago the clothes line, built with sturdy wooden posts and cross beams, stood on the far side of the cedar tree. Now its northern post is engulfed in branches. The outhouse, still visible in its pile of moldered lumber when I arrived, has long since joined the remains of the wildflowers that grew up between the boards, fell over, and decomposed. It is almost twelve years since the meadow was cut, and it is only in the last two that wild cherry bushes have spread from individuals to patches of isolated mini-woodlands that shelter bird and spider nurseries.

Each winter I cover the rain barrels and shovel the long driveway; each spring I listen for the voice of the wood frog and try to avoid the black flies’ bite. Every other summer or so I get to the task of clearing the meadow, cutting all the box elders’ sprouts to the ground. In the fall I greet the disc harrow and Orion on their return to my view, and wonder which Turkey Vulture sighting will be my last of the year.

Eventually, I will leave this place. The meadow will give way to box elder trees, or not. As I sleep beneath the child’s rainbow, my window open to the night, what is sure for me is the Little Dipper, pinned at its tail by the North Star, circling overhead. What is almost as sure is the topsoil, building. Slowly, slowly.

 

Goldenrod Feast

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DSC_0374 painted lady not cropped

My backfield takes on a yellow hue when the Goldenrod comes into bloom, and having learned to blame the correct pollen  – ragweed – for my hay fever, I am unreserved in my welcome of it. Many others are unreserved as well. The yellow that catches my eye catches the attention of many species, and while I do the Goldenrod the good of simply leaving it alone, others do it the good of flying in for a meal and flying out with pollen they’ll spread to other Goldenrod plants.

On a sunny September day, Painted Lady Butterflies, bees, and wasps showed up to feast on the golden plumes.

Farewell

~ Eudora Watson ~ 2 Comments

The geese have been restive. All summer I’ve see them occasionally. They head from the swamp next door to the wetlands across the street and beyond the woods. Or they cross in the other direction, over the back field to settle somewhere past those woods. On the last few mornings I’ve noted them more often flying low over the house in pairs or threes. They’ve remained casual in their few calls and in their seemingly random direction of flight. From one day to the next there was no change in urgency, no sense of real departure. Yesterday, on the last of a run of days in the 80s – a heat wave even by a summer measure here – they crossed the sky high up, in formation.

Geese formationThey have shifted into travelers; their calls have become what they become each fall for those they leave behind – the final, genuine, farewell to late summer, the earliest of the signs that will, in sum, lead us to what we will slowly, slowly come to accept: fall is taking its place in the rotation of seasons; winter will follow.

Of Raspberries and Bees

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DSC_0563 Bee raspberry nice for web

These hot September days are ripening the fall-bearing raspberries. Their canes arch and nod, and many clusters of fruit are partially hidden by leaves. When I’m out picking berries, I have often held a cane at its tip to lift it up for a look underneath – checking for fruit and for bees that might be feeding there. The berry patch has been especially active with bees these sunny days, and I’ve been picking raspberries early in the morning to keep out of the bees’ way.

Today I got a late start: the sun was well up, and the bees were in full swing of feeding. I moved slowly as I picked, and often stopped to photograph the insects I saw. That unhurriedness gave me time to observe where the bees actually do settle on the plants. I learned that our foraging territories don’t overlap at all – they are after a far different harvest. I am looking for the ripest raspberries, they are only interested in the earliest stages of that fruit, just when the blossom has started to turn in on itself in preparation of creating a berry. In the company of these bees, a few hours later in the day makes no difference: there is nothing to fear.

Early morning raspberry harvest

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I lifted a nodding cane of raspberry to check for fruit, and found as well a crab spider crouched there, its light-green, almost translucent coloring a perfect complement to the red of the berries. The spider drew back into the berry, and I let the cane nod back down.

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Last year, to the week, I didn’t see the spider until I had the fruit inside. I took her photograph and released her back into the berry patch.

Dahlias’ Gift

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DSC_0301At a local fund-raising event this summer, people lined up with their dogs in the parking lot outside the sports arena for a communal walk. Inside the arena, local craft folks and fund-raising tables were set up. From one long table of plants I selected three dahlia tubers from their cardboard box. They were, as is the way of dahlias, contorted beings that held no outwardly sign of what will come. Planted, the dahlias grew to over five feet in height. There, they unfurled blossom upon blossom. I will return their gift and dig them up to shelter them for another season.