and inhale

The weather has been complicating daily life here for a while now. It's a waste of time to complain about weather but the simple fact is, there is nothing - not one thing - made easier in my life by rain. So when it goes on for days and weeks, it becomes wearing. Even the goats have been uncharacteristically subdued, when they are not being frustrated and short-tempered. It's a tough emotional range. I understand completely.

BUT.

Today the sun (the sun!) is shining and the sky is astonishingly clear. There's a breathability to the atmosphere that has all the exquisite quality of a very fine wine. Even more exquisite to me, since I rarely drink wine these days, and I breath frequently.

When I stepped outside this morning I stopped dead in my tracks, inhaled, and sighed in relief. "Let's savor this, shall we, goats?" I called out to the herd. "Let's all live in the moment and breath frequently!"

By the way, do these look different than my usual line drawings? They do to me. Back in June I tried a "micro tip brush pen." I thought it would be like my longtime favorite Micron 0.25mm pens, just with a bendy feel because of the brush tip. Well, it is certainly bendy but not very micro. At first it felt like drawing with a fat Sharpie. I stuck with it, adjusted my approach, and began aiming for quick, bold lines, instead of my usual slow, delicate lines. It's been a really useful exercise.

These flowers - daylilies, milkweed, spiderwort - were drawn from photographs taken during the rare moments in the past two weeks when it was not raining. Even so, every flower in every photograph was wearing raindrops. I don't want to sound mean about it, but I felt no inclination to include the raindrops in the drawings.

I decided to post a few of these drawings because this afternoon I did something I haven't been able to do in weeks: I took my sketchbook outside, sat in a dry chaise, chatted with several goats who ambled cheerfully over to see what I was up to, and made this sketch of one of the black birches:

It was such a relief.

Just like breathing.

~~~~~

wordless wednesday

 

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saturated sunday

 

It was not raining yesterday when these pictures were taken.

This year I've become very aware of the aroma of milkweed.

It's lovely, and stops me in my tracks at least twice every day, as I pass the plants growing next to the path to the barn.

Daily trips with the little hay cart have been rerouted to prevent a collision with the one milkweed plant growing in the shorter path.

Spiderwort is providing surprises:

I've now seen four shades of purple on individual plants.

Here are two:

And a single spiderwort plant blooming white. 

The palette of the barn gardens is about to change.

Daylilies on the brink of blooming:

After several years of trying, the precious thornless raspberries I've planted in the terrace garden seem to have come to terms with the tough soil and light conditions here, and are not just surviving, but growing. They are currently doing as well as can be expected in a subtropical rainforest.

(This snap makes my mouth water.)

Wishing you all an excellent week ahead.

And wishing us all a bit of moderate weather.

I don't know anyone who doesn't need it.

~~~~~

visitor

This beautiful creature was at my door yesterday morning.

Actually, it was *on* my door, under the portico, but later flew onto a sapling where there was just enough light to take these snaps.

I know almost nothing about moths, but it was easy to identify this one in seconds by searching for "MA moth huge brown." It's Antheraea polyphemus; a native silkmoth. And the pheromone-detecting antennae indicate that this one is a male.

In late afternoon, when thunderstorms were predicted, I clipped the branch the moth was resting on and gently carried branch and moth back under the shelter of the portico. The moth was having none of it. It flew high up into the branches of tall trees by the barn. I was able to track it's path much more easily than that of a bird, in part because of it's size but also because of it's swoopy, up-and-down fluttery flight.

In case you might be interested, this link contains lots of information and many pictures of the lifecycle of Antheraea polyphemus, on a blog written by a huge fan of silkmoths. I visited just to see a few snaps, but ended up reading every word. And this link on the same blog documents the process of collecting and spinning silk from hatched-out silkmoth cocoons. Fascinating.

Have you ever spun silk from cocoons? I saw silkmoth cocoons for sale at a fiber fair years ago - again, these were cocoons from which the moth had already hatched and departed - but had no idea of how to harvest and process silk. It seemed likely to be overwhelmingly finicky and labor-intensive considering the tiny volume of fiber produced.

In the "Life is Funny, Retrospective Department," this was the very fiber fair at which I met cashmere goats for the first time.

Mallow says, " Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha."

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nearly wordless wednesday

sketched from Vincent van Gogh's
"Landscape with Pollard Willows"

the spiderwort is blooming!

horse brass remnant,
found by @scottylar

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