Filling a Day of Social Distancing - 5/13/2020
/Continuing the blog post series prompted by COVID-19….
Here are the unique activities for yesterday:
Two iris flowers. Iris flowers don’t last that long. Once they start wilting, I snap them off. This morning when I got to my office, there were two more flowers that had opened overnight and another bud that is not far behind. Two others are showing purple. The last two I’m not sure will make it. They might not have been mature enough when I cut the stem.
Morning Drama. As I started to write this post, there was a group of birds that flew past the window making a ruckus. I got up to see the drama. A crow circled around with something in its beak; it was chased by a robin with other robins also flying around. Some grackles watched from the sycamore. The crow flew on with its prize and the robins gave up. I surmised that it was a hatchling from a robin nest…and had a second thought: I hope it was a cowbird rather than a robin hatchling!
Morning glory and tangles. The central flower is another page from the 1882 Flower Designs book. I kept the page intact rather than cutting it into tiles – discovered that the larger format makes it harder to turn the page to be comfortable making the tangles in the space I normally use for projects.
Spring of 1964. I browsed the Life Magazines from Spring of 1964 on Internet Archive. They became the prompt to think about what I was doing then. I have a vivid memory of my 4th grade classroom that spring…of my pregnant teacher finishing a series of lectures about tornadoes which had been very interesting to all the students…she turned to the windows on the left side of the classroom and said ‘And there is one’….it was still white but was definitely a funnel….the sirens went off and we all trooped out into the hallway to kneel with our hand covered heads tucked toward the wall….it seemed liked it was a very long time before we were able to get up. A Google search found a reference for the event; it happened on April 3, 1964 and was an F5 tornado….one of the 3 major tornadoes to impact Wichita Falls, Texas. I was old enough to have been browsing through the Life Magazines at my grandparents, but I don’t specifically remember any of the stories. I do remember knowing about Douglas McArthur’s death, but I think it was more likely from the newspaper. By 4th grade I was already browsing the morning newspaper before I had breakfast and went off to school. Looking at the magazines now…the photographs that appeal to me the most were from a story about winter in Venice.
Putting out the glass bird bath. I decided that we are unlikely to have another frost so it’s safe to put the glass bird bath out in the front flowerbed. The stand for it is always there. I’m not sure how many birds use the bath because I can only see it from the narrow windows on the sides of the front door; I should check every time I go by now. While I was out I pulled a few trees that had sprouted in the front flowerbed. The one I photographed is a red maple.
Links to my previous “filling a day of social distance” posts here.
And now for the after-bath preening of a Carolina Wren
I saw the Carolina Wren hop into the gutter of our covered deck not far from my office window. There was still some water in it from a recent rain. I got up fast enough to see it dunking itself in the water but by the time I had my camera it had already flown to the sycamore and looked very scruffy. Over the next minute it did a lot of preening. It still looked a bit scruffy at the end but at least it was holding its tail up in typical wren fashion.
We’d had a wren in the screened part of our deck earlier in the day and this might have been the same bird…cleaning up after the ordeal. We opened the door to the outside for it to escape but it took more than an hour for the bird to find the opening. It must have been a traumatic experience.
