fairy ring mushrooms

fairy ring mushrooms

magically appear after

a late summer rain

Fairy ring mushrooms popped up overnight, conjured by the magic of rain. They emerge, not in a ring, but in a sinuous curve following the wood chip path to the house. The spores waited through the drought for this moment, perhaps stored away in the bark of the tree that died and got turned into firewood and wood chips for the walkway. The delicate full caps look like powdered breasts with brown nipples. But when the mushrooms first emerge, they look utterly phallic. In the rain, the fragile fungi only last the day, then begin to fray and tatter, finally falling over, revealing fluted bellies.  

gold and crimson band

gold and crimson band

beneath a purple mantle

mirrored by the pond

Ephemeral Artist, creating breath-catching skyscapes with light and water, a kaleidoscope of constantly changing colors, new and ever new, now here, now gone.
          On the other horizon, the cloud cover obscures the full moon rising. This happens to be a blue moon, the second full moon of the month, which recurs about once every 33 months. Many people are familiar with this phenomenon, but not many know its technical name: intracalmonthal-biplenilune (within the month, second full moon).

scanning for rodents

scanning for rodents, 

a barn owl swivels her head,

torso motionless

It's early evening but not yet dusk when I catch a glimpse of a large bird sitting on a post by the side of the road as I pass by. A hawk? The bird turns its head toward me and I immediately recognize the beautiful heart-shaped face of a barn owl, Tyto alba. At the bottom of the hill, I turn around and go back.
          From the darker plumage, the owl appears to be a female. She doesn't seem to mind my presence, so I watch in fascination as she scans the grasses for rodents, swiveling her head from front to back and up and down, all the while keeping her body in one position. At one point she does squat to peer forward and down, then straightens up, rotates her head to the left and peers down behind. This amazing head-swiveling is almost comical, yet it has evolved as is an extremely efficient hunting ability.
          Owls are known for their keen eyesight at night. The owl's large, tubular eyes are fixed in a relatively small skull, so the owl turns its head to focus. Without moving its torso, the owl can rotate its head around 270 degrees to see in all directions. Thus, with minimal motion and maximum attention, the owl waits silently and patiently for its prey.

the gibbous moon tints

the gibbous moon tints

 the banner of crystal clouds 

with a pink halo

The gibbous moon nestles like an ostrich egg in a circle of pink and white down. How quickly the high cirrus clouds slip away, while the much higher moon continues her slow ascent across the cobalt canopy. The Earth-born Moon, like a grown child, long ago moved away from her mother, but not too far. They remain connected by such a strong, invisible umbilical cord that the Moon never turns her face away from her mother. The clouds are also Earth-born, as is the atmosphere which they inhabit, but they hug their mother closely, afraid of the great emptiness beyond.

swimming in the rain

swimming in the rain --

half immersed in warm water,

half spattered with cold drops

Once you're wet, a little rain hardly matters. But I'm in the minority on that score. In fact, I'm the only person swimming, some might say foolishly, in the rain. It's a rare experience, the contrast of the relatively warm water in which I'm immersed with the cold raindrops spattering my arms and face. I've also been known to swim in a lake with a glacier at one end. Now there was an experience in contrast, my body hot from hiking, plunging into the frigid water. Of course, once you're numb, you don't feel anything anymore, so icy water hardly matters.

stopping by a cornfield

stopping by a cornfield

on a hot summer evening

to watch the sunset,

crystalline clouds reflecting

gold, orange, red, then pink

In the low light of the setting sun, the corn is all golden -- tassels, dry yellow leaves, stalks and corn husks covering the hard golden kernels. The swirls of cirrus clouds above the sun look like stained glass, alabaster white and molten gold at first, then swiftly changing to burnished copper, burning ember.

In the south, the half moon floats at half mast between strands of cirrus fibratus that look like some ancient grandfather's wispy beard.

The sun turns into a golden urn as its light is distorted by the clouds.

Is that a dragon hovering above the sinking sun?

Like a flare, the sun shoots up a column of gold as the light reflects from the crystals in the high-flying cirrus clouds.

After the sun has disappeared below the horizon, its lingering light turns the clouds in the east cotton candy pink. 

bird pecked Concord grapes

bird pecked Concord grapes, 

purple slip skins split open,

glistening pulp popped out

I'm down on my knees, carefully gathering the dark blue and purple globes of Concord grapes, leaving the green ones to ripen. All of the grapes are covered with a translucent "bloom," scratched here and there where the grape has rubbed against a leaf or vine -- Concord calligraphy.

Our Concord grapes did well this year, in spite of the drought, with lots of clusters hidden under the canopy of green leaves. They certainly retain the hardiness of their wild ancestor, from which they were developed in 1849 by Ephraim Wale Bull of Concord, Massachusetts.

The ground is strewn with fallen grapes, many of them broken open, the glistening green pulp popped out of the slip skin. It looks like the work of birds -- chipmunks, raccoons and deer would eat the whole fruit.

I'm also popping grapes into my mouth as I pick, one of the pleasant perks of harvesting. The pulp slips out of the thick skin easily. The juice is sweet and a little tart, not like sugar-bomb seedless grapes, but I have to work to extract the seeds from the viscous pulp. A few seeds get crunched, but that's all right, because grape seed polyphenols are a potent antioxidant. The skins of these grapes, because they are not completely ripe, are a bit astringent, but I swallow them because purple grape skins also contain a powerful antioxidant.

Some insect has been eating the grape leaves, leaving a trail of holes. Well, people in many cultures eat stuffed grape leaves, but I don't care to sample bitter leaves with my mouth full of grape juice.

My father raised grapes on proper trellises, and he spent a lot of time training the grapes with his pruning shears, nipping the vines here and there, and sometimes the grape clusters, to encourage more production of grapes. Concord grapes are good for fresh grape juice but not wine. With the ripe grapes he also made grape jelly, which we slathered on our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And he pressed the green grapes to make nonalcoholic verjus (verJHOO), an unfermented alternative to vinegar. Unlike vinegar's strong acidic taste, verjus is sweet, tart and mildly acidic, great on salads and lightly steamed vegetables. 

I'm not as diligent as my father. Our grapes grow up, along, over and down the low split bamboo fence on the west side of the house. In the fall I cut back some of the vines that are trailing on the ground and use the pliant vines to make lovely wreaths. 

But mostly the grape vines train themselves, sending out curving tendrils that wrap around anything they come in contact with -- other vines, other plants or the fence.

If they don't encounter anything within some mysterious time limit, the tendrils curve back and wrap around themselves.

Even though this tendril has not accomplished its mission of anchoring the vine, it still succeeds in creating a beautiful work of art.