laughter through tears

My sweetie pie comes from a largish family – I believe he has something like thirty-and-a-few first cousins – and they’re all loud and crazy enough to have kept in touch over a couple of generations, such that at family reunions, second cousins show up as well. They’re a lot of fun. In my family, when we vacation together, we typically like to ignore each other amiably while we each read, or go for walks on the beach, coming together at meals. We have fun too – just in a more subdued way. In his family, everybody’s in the same room, generally all talking at the same time.
Sadly, the most spirited and ebullient of Kevin’s cousins passed away unexpectedly last week. Paul was only a handful of months older than Kevin, so it gives one pause. Over the weekend, we went down to Lawn Guyland for the wake and funeral: alas, the fourth such occasion in the past five years. We have the routine down. On Friday, the last of the visiting hours at the funeral home were held. It was pretty festive on the whole, with moments here and there throughout the evening of tears and hugs. Afterwards, some of us gathered at a diner for a very late dinner, yakking, carrying on, stealing food from one another’s plates, and generally behaving just shy of badly enough to avoid getting tossed to the curb by our friendly, but clearly world-weary, waitress.
On Saturday, we gathered again at the funeral home. The presiding attendant asked friends and neighbors to prepare to pay respect to Paul one last time. Then he asked aunts, uncles, and cousins to do the same. About half the room stood up. Giggling ensued. Eventually we made our way over to the church for Mass. Paul’s brother Bob gave a fantastic eulogy. As Kevin put it, when he placed the can of Budweiser on the lectern, he had us in the palm of his hand.
After the graveside services, we toasted Paul with more Budweiser, and then repaired to a restaurant where we stuffed ourselves silly. Once we got to the part where the kids were running laps around the room, it was time to go. The consensus is that Paul’s up in Heaven, firing up the grill, putting the beer on ice, and generally doing what he does best: creating a great party for friends and family, with a lot of food. And a lot of beer.
And then Kevin and I came home.
I finally.finally.finally. got outside with the camera after a lull of rainy weather last week, plus the weekend travel. Charlie was glad to see me, and hopped up on my lap as I attempted to capture the process by which beech leaves go brown.

Self-portrait with cat.

Beech. A rainbow of green all the way to brown on a single sapling.


Goldenrod.


Yellow foxtail: seeds formed and released.


Miss Lady, aka Maggie, poses for her portrait.


Wild rose. My buddies. Still hanging on to their desiccated stamens.


Drying fern fronds. Notice the dots?


They’re the spores.


Whoa…trippy.
Out in the field, a few brave souls are ignoring the memos.

“October, schmoctober”, says the violet.

Black-eyed Susan: “I got it going on.”


One last goldenrod puts on a show.


While the rest pump out seeds.
Meanwhile, in other news, last week a utility truck clipped the end of the bridge.

Ooops.
Someone came around to fix it on Friday, when we were heading out of town.

Much better.

a net of diamonds

So, does the spider say “dammit!” or does the spider say, “excellent, look at all this drinking water?”


Some kind of mold or fungus is troubling some of the evening primrose seed pods. I don’t remember seeing this last year. Of course, last year, I didn’t know this was primrose. In fact, if you look at this here post from about this time last year, I have learned a ton since then. I was taking pictures of the same species, but didn’t know what they were. Yee haw!
Anyway, back to the primrose…

The ones at the top of the stalk – this stalk, incidentally, is maybe four feet tall – are the newest, and largely still green.


Down the stalk a bit, they’re starting to ripen. Which, once again, looks a lot like “decaying”, “dying”, “getting all oogy and brown”. There’s a life lesson in here somewhere.


Until at last you come to the opened-up pods with seeds inside.
A search for life and color leads us to the world of lichens and mosses…



We live on an awesome planet.
I startled what I think is a spring peeper. Normally they have “X”’s on their backs, and I’ve sort of convinced myself that this one has the “X”, but it’s faint, which apparently can happen. All the other froggies around here are way more marked up, so I’m going with peeper for the time being.

Look at those tiny little fingers! As I told Kevin, who was chopping wood into kindling nearby, I think I’m in love.


Tasty shrooms.


This caterpillar does not seem bothered by all the spikies on the yellow foxtail. It’s eating all the seeds anyway. I took several pictures before figuring out which end’s the head, and which end’s the bum. Answer: head’s on the bottom. As for the plant: this time last year then I was calling yellow foxtail “that tall grassy thingy”. Maybe by this time next year I’ll know what kind of caterpillar that is. Or maybe it’s not a caterpillar. Maybe it’s a larva. Whatever that means. I think it means, similar stage in the lifecycle, but not going to end up a butterfly or moth.
Boatloads of mushrooms in the woods – I know nothing about mushrooms, so these will all be unidentified for now…

I took waaaayyyy more pictures of different mushroom than I’m posting, mostly because the light was crappy and they all wound up blurry, dark, etc. etc.


Is this snail not gorgeous? Look at the almost phosphorescent bits – is that in the shell? Are these body parts we’re looking at? Snails have – get this – lungs! Well, only one lung per. Also? Livers. Who knew?
It was a damp and occasionally drizzly day today. Not the greatest weather for putting laundry out on the deck to dry (oops!). And not so great for our friends, the windblown seeds.

cattail

thimbleweed (tall anemone)

OK, that was my afternoon. Happy rest-of-the-weekend, world!

little miss cranky

What a gorgeous weekend we just had here in beautiful southern Vermont, and gosh golly ma’am, what a CRAPPY MOOD I’VE BEEN IN. I’m having trouble adjusting to the season changing. I’m already half in February in my mind, when there is nothing and I mean nothing, blooming, and it’s so cold I can’t dawdle outside the way I like to and even if I could, the camera doesn’t work well in the cold either. And I haven’t run even so much as five miles at a pop in weeks, and I miss my endorphins and I’m MEAN.
Mind you, it’s not even the fall equinox yet, but I didn’t let that get in the way of my perfectly miserable mood.
Instead, I went to a friend’s birthday party yesterday. That’s right, I left the house, while in a foul mood. I hung out with our mutual friend, and the two of us groused about how crabby we were, and then I bonded with my hostess friend for a bit, and she confessed she was grumpy too – something about All These People Coming Over. So that lifted my mood considerably, I had a fine old time, and watched these other people I didn’t know fire potatoes off into the woods with a potato rocket. It’s some PVC pipe and it involves lighting hairspray on fire. Brilliant.
I burned off some of the bad ass attitude with housework, and with a (for me) furiously fast 4.5 miler today. And yesterday I worked out on the treadmill AND went for an aggressively paced 4 mile walk. Plus, I forced myself outside as well, to prove to myself that things are still growing.To wit:

wild rose hips. See that spooge? Remember it from here? It’s all the dried up stamens and stuff. Nice!


thank god for hawkweed.


yellow foxtail. Try and eat my seeds and I’ll STAB YOU.


aster flowers having a perm.


cattails are starting to lose their minds.


morning glory starting to pack it in for the day.


“stick out your tongue”, aka butter-and-egg.


riots of queen anne’s lace, above and below.



more yellow foxtail, above and below.

onwards and upwards.

grasses, sedges, and spiders

This is yellow foxtail (Setaria glauca), a grass whose golden bristles give it a glow, as though it comes with its own backlight.

“All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.”


You’ve probably seen plantain, a not particularly attractive lawn weed, and not given it much thought.

Think again. It’s flowering.

Proof that even the “blegh” species are anything but.
A grasshopper and I spied on each other.


Finally, s/he emerged, just a little.


Strange things comprise a meadow: check out this sedge, Carex flava.

It’s both bulgy, AND spiky! 

Or how about a sweet spider, watching me photograph her at home in the barberpole sedge (Scirpus rubrotinctus)?

I couldn’t get my trusty point-and-shoot to focus on her eyes, even though she apparently has plenty to choose from.