scenes of summer

[marycatelli]

The bumblebees love the coneflowers, but the honeybees love the butterfly weed. They swarm over the orange flowers while the bumblebees cover the yellow center of the pink ones. (Plus a few butterflies, pale yellow or white, that go for the butterfly weed.)

A bird, completely upside down, walks along the bottom of a wall from an outstretched part of a building.

One snapdragon would look pink were it not surrounded by others that actually are pure pink. It is clearly a pastel purple.

A creature wanders down the side of the brook, fortunately down a bank from the road. It has a pale band running down its head and its back and only bifurcating just at its tail, leaving a bit of black between the white there.

An odd arrangement of cloud. The rising moon, still yellow, looks like a pillar with bands across it, because the clouds are thicker to either hand.

The robin does not look dapper. The belly is all a fledgling patchwork of pale and dark and drab copper

The air, the morning after the hurricane, smells green from all the bruised leaves and downed limbs with all their leaves. One tree is split down the middle almost to the roots.

The petunias are pitiful, with all their petals stripped away by the hurricane winds.

A raven saunters on the grass, and the sunshine is so bright that its feathers look sable brown, not black.

I watered the garden the day after the hurricane, we got so little rain. Indeed, some plants needed it badly. One had an obvious reason: the hurricane winds must have pulled on it, because it was half-uprooted.

The purslane is withering. It has good thick succulent type leaves precisely for dry weather, and though we had a hurricane blast through last week, it's withering all along the road.

The marsh is filled with green and brown from the cattails, and purple from the loosestrife growing all intermixed.

The clouds, dark and dry and billowing, lower over the dark evening. The wind blows, and the pale yellow leaves skitter over the road and heap up in the corners. It's August. Between the hurricane and the drought, the scene is awfully autumnal.

I wake to a dove-gray day, all even clouds overhead, and a mourning dove tolling its cry. When I leave church, it is raining. It rains all day, steady, and without a breath of breeze, so it is safe to leave all the windows open all day.

An unkindness of ravens cawing at the roadside, some perched on the roof, and here and there the fledgings are flecked with pale feathers.

Comments

[shirebound]

The clouds, dark and dry and billowing, lower over the dark evening. The wind blows, and the pale yellow leaves skitter over the road and heap up in the corners. It's August. Between the hurricane and the drought, the scene is awfully autumnal.

Such powerful imagery.

[marycatelli]

thank you!