Small Potatoes in the Stew Pot

It's a strange thing...life.  You go to bed happy, and next morning you're crying remembering your parents who left you ages ago, even though you wanted them to live forever.  Then an almond butter and jam covered cracker breaks into three pieces as you bite it and two pieces plop jam-side down onto your dress.

You moan a bit (I'm being nice here), put the two pieces - minus half of the almond butter and jam - back onto the sandwich plate, which then falls face down onto your lap when you accidentally nudge it the wrong way.  I might be better climbing back into bed and calling it a day.

It's a lazy day; therefore I'm watering my yard still in my jam stained dress in the early afternoon, since it took a few hours to motivate myself beyond the front door.  A cool afternoon of 91 degrees; I'll blame that on not remembering to fill the bird feeder discovered empty hours earlier when I peeked out the front window to see if my yard was still there.  The squirrels must have been starving this morning.  I would prefer if they snacked here and ate regular meals elsewhere, but I fear it's the exact opposite  :(

Dustin doing what Dustin does best

It's an odd mix that I need to water in the less shady parts of my yard, while the concrete patio has green growing near all the planters in the shade.  I purchased spray to kill the mold, but I also have the common five-line (blue tail) skink lizards of all sizes traveling and hiding all over my yard - so the question that never seems to get answered is spray - don't spray, spray - don't spray, spray - don't spray?  I limbed up the potted shrubs yesterday, so we shall see.

I'm not a 24/7 type of television watching personality, and yet lately I've found myself immersed in a ton of subtitle foreign films and series on Netflix more in the mystery type genre.   It's not to be watched at dinner unless one can hold their plate to their mouth so their eyes don't miss the text.  (Sadly, that's me.)

Whatever happened to non-depressing endings?  Do they not exist anymore across the ocean?  After the latest "The Break"; I'm wondering if it's title had something to do with the urge, after watching season two, to take a break by plunging my head into my toilet bowl and breathing deeply.  I'm moving on to Britbox and hopefully a little bit more positivity.

Centuries ago when I was young, my parents gave me a Brownie camera that focused my life on photography.  In my twenties a boyfriend gave me a used Cannon Pentax 35 mm (SLR) camera which I pretty well wore out over years of use.  I took many black and white photos in the beginning, because he taught me how to develop them.

A day might find me on my stomach in a muddy puddle or on my back in a weed patch to take that perfect macro shot.  But alas, my collection of photos mistakenly found their death in a dumpster, in a not so good year of my life.

In later years my half-brother gave me a used Nikon camera with a telephoto lens, so some distance could be left between myself and the subject.  Eventually, when I was slightly old, I purchased a Sony digital camera with so many bells and whistles it did me in, or maybe I just got tired of the complexity of it all.  It sat in a drawer, until a few months ago we gave it to one of my stepdaughters.

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail on Joe Pye Weed

Now my life's complicated twice as much with a smart phone that thinks it's one of the big guys.  Of course, it isn't, but I don't have the heart to ruin the rest of it's deluded life telling it so.  I'll take, say...maybe 500 clicks of wings flying all around me as I wade into that Joe Pye Weed patch, and hope for the best.  First edit deletes the out-of-focus and downright boring ones.  Sometimes that leaves me with nothing :(  

Honeybee

Isolated comfortably in my artificial silence behind a closed door to the outside world, I sit and concentrate on how to finish this mulligan stew of disconnected thoughts with an ending that sublimely hides just out of my reach.  It's no use...I give up.  Opening the front door and looking out into the moonlight darkness, my world of quiet suddenly becomes this melody of nature's nightlife that seems to fill the cosmos with a quiet beauty that day can never bring.

Turning the porch light on to rule out a night spider's web greeting me in the face, I turn it back off and sit on the glider bench.  I'm trying to not imagine something invisible crawling up my leg, or hopping off the top of the glider onto my neck, or bumping into me as it flies through all that darkness.  It's a tall order to achieve :)

Gliding back and forth, the smell of fresh air is pleasant.  A chorus of a zillion tree crickets fills the void with a gentle high pitched hum that is relaxing.  Katydids can be heard above the cricket songs... KATY did it... KATY did it... KATY did it...  Add the twinkling stars overhead, and it doesn't get much better than this at the end of an ordinary summer day.

Austin 

Soft comfort for a weary soul.