This Saturday Scribe Entry is posted on behalf of
Zilla's other Half in response to the prompt of Aug 15th

---

It was dark but not bleak.
Black but not night,
Light shone faintly if one could but see it .
Vassily looked longingly through iron bars
Only one feather remained
One feather, golden, shining, with ephemeral light
Illuminating just grey, dusty stones.

‘How did I get here?’ he asked himself,
‘Where am I?’ he asked no one in particular.
As if in answer, zephers wafted past him.
Sparkles danced, lifting feather, dust, words, memories
He hung his head.
Baba Yaga he sighed.

Tsar Morievno had bequeathed upon Prince Vassily one task.
He must go somewhere – he knew not where
He must bring back he knew not what.
Vassily would do all this, he would have done more
All for her hand, her lovely tender hand,
Her smiling face

He started.
‘What?’ he exclaimed again. ‘How does feather move? What makes it fly?’
Spinning, shining, glimmering, standing on end, it wafted towards his cell
Then, when he could not have been more surprised, it spoke.
But it was Maria’s voice he heard.
‘You were kind. You were fair. Baba Yaga is neither. I will free you, but you must follow my instructions if marring me is your desire.’
‘Ah’ he breathed, ‘anything for you my beloved.’

Twisting, turning, changing shape,
‘It has become key’ he thought astonished.
Changing again, bars open, he held out his hand
Key became ring; slipped onto his right forefinger
‘When warm I glow, Baba Yaga is close,
Use my warning well.
Visit stables on your way out, all you need will be there.’

Obeying instructions he carefully fled his prison.
With every footstep he waited for her warning.
As per her instructions, in cold stables he found all that she had arranged.
Sword, horse, all this prince could ask for,
But two rabbits bound together, this box, filled with powder?
There were reasons, he was sure.
Maria knew many things.

Mounting, he moved into dawn, white mane changing colours as daylight grew around them.
‘You are beautiful animal,’ he murmured.
‘I thank you,’ horse replied, tossing his head.
‘Now be quiet,’ it added.
Obediently he rode.
Forest, dale, river.
Still day came no closer.

‘Where are we’ he finally ventured.
‘Land in perpetual dawn’, it replied quietly.
Then things changed.
Trees became twisted, gnarled, ugly, foreboding,
Colours became silhouettes, shadows became longer
Before he saw, he sensed her
Her hut, on one leg, standing facing away from him
Surrounded by statues,
With one dog, two heads on guard
Pikes surrounding, heads crowning, fenceline grimly decorated.

‘Rabbit for you,’ he said, swinging them above his head.
As they fell, two jaws snapped, rendered, fought.
Slipping into apparent sleep they collapsed, content from their meal
He dismounted, standing staring.
‘Remember sword, you will need it soon,’ his mount reminded him.
‘Remember too, your box, you will need it later,’ it finished.
After obtaining these items, he turned, venturing forth past two sleeping heads

Stepping past skull sentries, suddenly movement caught his eye.
Shadows were moving, changing, approaching,
But his finger grew no warmer.
He drew his sword, its light not unlike that feather that danced before him in his cell.
By its light, skeletons danced their own unholy dance in Baba Yaga’s yard.
After all his travels, he knew no more surprise,
But worked that blade, that gift, as one possessed,
Hewing bone from bone, till all collapsed in heaps before his feet.
Then his finger grew warm,
His hand grew warm
He could feel her evil breeze
Hear her mortar grind against pestle bringing her home.

Her laughter came first,
‘What have we here, my dears?’
‘Oh my, I sense dinner awaiting me.’
Vassily realized in fear that as strong as it was, this sword would not do,
As fast as it was, his brave horse would not do,
No more rabbits had he for her stew.
But what he did have, he knew, was Maria’s last gift.
Although he knew not what it might do.

Bravely he drew it.
He leant on his sword,
He knew from many old stories that meeting her gaze was hazardous,
So not looking up, knowing she’d landed,
Her crooked form leaning from her pestle as she considered eating him,
He held up his hand, box on his palm,
‘This gift is for you Granny’ he offered, his voice quite strong
‘Gift?’ she questioned, her voice quite suspicious,
But Maria’s magic was strong, her ring quite hidden
From Baba Yaga’s evil eyes,
So after judging Vassily quite mad, but probably tasty,
She accepted his gift.

Opening it, she screamed,
Her arms flailed,
Trees danced in fear,
Vassily quailed but stood his ground, gripping his sword
Wind blew harder than it had when she’d landed,
Twisting, churning, kicking up dust, bones, debris
Things unidentified flew past him although his eyes were now shut tight.
Then his finger cooled as her pestle bore her away, screaming from his sight.

‘Ah Maria, you have saved me,’ he said aloud.
Opening his eyes he could see Baba Yaga’s hut.
It had turned so its opening now faced him.
As he approached it slowly, he realized there was light inside, however subdued.
Just as he was stepping inside,
Ring became feather
Feather became beacon
Beacon found phoenix chained
His sword moved as if alive, breaking Baba Yaga’s magic
He was stunned again by its beauty, changing like flames dancing
Then feather sought bird, making it whole
He was moved by its cry, exultant as it flew by him

‘My thanks, my prince, it called from high above.’
‘For your kindness, I will meet you again when you return home’.
With that, it flew away, spraying glorious daylight behind it.
Mounting his white horse, Vassily asked it if it knew its way home.
Galloping through forest, over hill, across streams, down dales, they returned home.
Tsar Morievno was overjoyed seeing him return alive.
‘Ah Vassily, you have completed your task. This wonderful bird has returned, which has made me very glad. As you were instrumental in its return, I honour my word by offering you my daughter’s hand in marriage.’

As if by silent signal, beautiful Maria appeared, bathing all that saw her with her radiance.

With marriage proclaimed, they lived happily ever after (as much as one can in old mother Russia).

OK...so our triple is Love, Dove and Above...as I waited for the signal to pour down from the great beyond I opted for bonus points...see if you can find them.

---

I hadn’t given the matter much thought really, as it wasn’t the kind of thing to occupy my mind under normal circumstances. This is mainly because I wasn’t given to flights of fancy which were, quite frankly, a waste of time. Certainly imagination has its place in the world but untrammeled and allowed to wander where it will it simply misdirects those who end up becoming addicted to it more often than not. Obviously something about the real world is too disappointing or painful or hard for ‘imaginative’ types to cope with and they use some kind of fairy-logic to escape the ordinary, to rise above the terrible mundanity the world holds for them.

Imagination harnessed is the stuff of human achievement. It allowed Archimedes to leap from his bath or Einstein to grasp the phantom mechanisms of the very cosmos. Imagination for it’s own sake swirls around a drain and vomits out a Pollock’s canvas of arbitrary nonsense to which the ‘artist’ inevitably ascribes a gobbledygook meaning or insists it is ‘our’ job to interpret. What a load of rubbish.

I have no use for these Keatsian romantics and their insistence on soaking the world in gin and turning the pleasant modulations of the family Columbidae into the cooing of the dove laced with some kind of metaphysical meaning. You’d have to be as drug addled as Coleridge himself to ascribe the deep, and I might add non-existent, yearnings of the human heart to the warble of a not particularly bright bird species. It seems fairly clear that what the likes of Coleridge and company really needed was a good job. Perhaps it’s something to do with the times but at least the ancient Greeks knew how to balance all that leisure with an application of critical thought that resulted in brilliant examination of the universe and deep art that didn’t get so painfully soppy.

So there I was being pressured to present my position on the ineffable and ultimate importance of the love of some quasi-mythical dead guy. I was, for some time, literally at a loss for words. Naturally I had to point out that if this dead paragon’s virtues and importance to the human race was ‘ineffable’ it more than implied that I could not actually address the matter. Apparently they had difficulty with dictionaries or just felt that ineffable was such a cool word that it should be allowed use with the tacit acknowledgment that it really didn’t mean ‘without the capacity to be described’. Or that naturally they really did hold fast to the meaning of ineffable but liked to pretend that you were allowed to have an opinion as inadequate to the task as it might be. Convenient that.

I admitted that I wasn’t sure where to start.

Should we get down to the fact that establishing that there was a guy who lived around that time was not even remotely the same thing as acknowledging that his progenitor was an anthropomorphized supernatural ‘power’ apparently running, well, everything through some kind of elaborate telepresence. I asked how it was that they wanted people to stop believing in a jolly fat man running a non-profit organization for three hundred and sixty four days a year only to go on an orgy of giving once per annum when they got a little older but still expected us to buy into the notion of a (far less jolly) sky juju who was keeping his own naughty and nice tally with far less pleasant ramifications than a lump of coal at the end of the year. Not to mention that this *thing* (for lack of a word that made any sense in their argument) has an apparent fixation about leaving his creation in the dark about his omnipresence in the ultimate case of white glove evidence tampering. How did this jive?

I asked if they didn’t expect me to question what they meant by the son’s ‘love’. I managed to avoid cracking wise about how I didn’t want him to feel that way about me but did have to ask what they thought ‘love’ was. Surely they couldn’t mean the bio-chemical, mentally challenging urges that are so clearly associated with romantic love? As much as it was a matter dealt with ad nauseum by poor old Coleridge and friends no reasonable person thought that it wasn’t just part and parcel of our being a big old bag of chemicals? I explained that I certainly had no use for the notion of civic love, you know, the ‘love thy neighbour’ type of love as I carefully pointed out was just lazy use of language. The romantics big goopy bag of ‘love’ isn’t all that mysterious to someone who steps back a few paces and looks at it for the what it is as a sum of parts. When they slop it around and drop it onto what are far simpler motivations about our relationship to our country, our kin or our fellow man they do us all a disservice. Or perhaps that they are simply being lazy and unwilling to examine what are complicated systems of thinking about societal well being but have not a damned thing to do with that cursed ‘L’ word.

I had just started to ask how it was that the son’s love was key to this whole process and how it sounded to me suspiciously like one of those key points in what makes Amway work for instance when they started to get hostile. I knew that they would likely start into Amway point number two, which would be about their mumbo-jumbo ‘trinity’ business but when push came to shove they it turns out that were really just looking for someone to endure their passive-aggressive faith-based harassment. When I asked if accepting his love was somehow meaningful because we were then dealing with a proxy who would make sure that ‘his dad was cool with it’ they got all huffy and stomped off my porch.

I assure you, I did not feel the love.

I'm starting to think of it as 'Before next Saturday Scribes' so sue me. As usual a sentence lanced down out of the ether and I was just dumb enough to wonder what it was all about. Go figure...

---

I've spent a few weeks trying to find a way out and all I have to show for my efforts is a tiny sense of bitterness, an appreciation for the vagaries of geography and a recurring migraine. At one point I also had an entire magnum of Talisker but as the frustration of my attempts grew on me so did the quantity of the single malt dwindle. I actually only finished off the bottle a few days ago and I can still taste the peat at the back of my mouth. If I close my eyes I can catch a whiff of that pepper and toffee. I suppose it's a good thing that it's gone as I'll have no pangs of guilt at not sharing any with the 'others'.

Mind you I also have a deep suspicion that they probably wouldn't care for it as they don't seem much inclined to partake in anything we make. I can see the hint of them out there, just at the edge of the puny light being thrown by my candle, another 'man thing' that they shun. They don't seem hostile, which I suppose is a blessing, but they also sure as heck have no interest in helping me. Fair enough, I got here, into their turf on my own and I guess that as far as they are concerned I should get my own stupid self out.

Some people would say that it was dumb luck that let me find this place but I'm also starting to get the feeling that whoever thought something that idiotic would hear from me about just what in the name of Sam Hill they thought 'luck' was. Yes, I stumbled across what I assume was the boundary unintended but for the life of me I didn't mean to.

At first I was inclined to bliss out because everything was so *warm* and beautiful and welcoming and soothing and...well, you get the idea. It didn't take all that long for the warm and fuzzy feeling to wear out. Sure the world seemed a bit brighter and everything was weirdly healthy and I felt a weird kind of physical buzz but my hindbrain wasn't happy. Some pragmatic part of my subconscious started bitching at me like the worn out and distorted speaker in a rail terminal. I knew that it was trying to tell me something useful but for the life of me I couldn't sort it. Despite the fact that my body was suffused with a sense of well being it wasn't that long before my brain was convinced my body was just too stupid for it's own good.

Pretty much any time that I started to feel hungry I'd run into a fruit tree or some berry shrubs and you shouldn't be surprised to know that those munchables were just plain awesome. There was a delicacy of flavour, a peak of ripeness and a perfection of satisfaction that I had never experienced before nor had I really spent any effort imagining. I'm no Epicure and truth be told I've often felt that food was often emblematic of screwed up, Byzantine requirements of our biological machinery. The edible things here however, actually made me wonder what a fool I'd been. Because I was feeling so good I must have made an effort not to think about how these repeated discoveries were too weird for the first little while but the first time I just stumbled across a box of Oreos not long after I'd been having a craving for cookies some alarm bells must have gone off.

It took a while and despite my discordant brain I also realised that I was managing not to care about the fact that I was wandering around without a hint of purpose kind of just stuck in a state of 'reception'. I was a big empty sponge soaking up colours and smells and tastes and qualities of light and the texture of bark or stone or moss or water. I suspect that I felt like some schmuck from the city might feel the first time they get somewhere really remote and really wild and are slapped in the face with how wholesome that must seen in contrast to pallid urban 'reality'. Well OK, maybe that sense times a few thousand.

The creaky old record kept going in the back of my head however and eventually I started to grow a sense of detachment. I was able to use critical faculties to look around me and wonder what the hell was going on. Not long after I became aware of the fact that I was aware I started noticing ‘them’. In retrospect I have to assume that they were around the whole time but I was just so wrapped up in being a walking nerve ending that I couldn’t come to grips with them.

So I don't know if it is to my credit that I find myself here scribbling on this paper I *really wanted* and confronting the fact that I don’t know if the door into fairyland has a counter-part. I have to assume that this is the case because we have intimations of this place on the other side but maybe I haven’t got the right kind of mind to find it. I’ve had pretty good luck attuning myself to fetching things from the other side but all I can suss out at this point is that they have to be pretty simple. No helicopters or zeppelins or chainsaws so far. Walking determinedly and concentrating fiercely have yielded a dizzying landscape and a wicked headache not to mention more and more of them.

Maybe they get curious the more out of tune with this place someone like me gets. Or maybe they crowd around when we’re close to making it out. Maybe I’ll find out tomorrow because right now my candle is sputtering and even the darkness here is warm and comforting and rich with the scent of lilies.

Sure it's late but you know what they say about the whole 'as opposed to never' thingamajig. This isn't going anywhere, I just opted to see where the hell that first sentence was going.

---

Gerald really hadn’t heard a word that Ted had been saying because it was pretty much a guarantee that Ted was going to be talking about boobs, TV or how awesome his last vacation was. The odds are that if Gerald waited for more than ten minutes all three subjects would weave into Ted’s monologue because that seemed to be pretty much the extent of Ted’s interests. What Gerald really couldn’t figure out was how it came to be that Ted formed the illusory notion that he could possibly give a crap what he, Ted, might have to say about boobs, television and his last vacation.

The cafeteria line was moving with particularly glacial speed this afternoon and it was looking like Ted might just get a good shot at the triple header. Gerald watched the very large woman from HR perusing the desserts under the glass like an epicure at Paris’s Berthillon on the Ile Saint-Louis.

“It’s just frikkin vanilla, chocolate or neopolitan for the sake of the Christ!” Thought Gerald, while trying quite hard to keep from appearing to be too agitated.

Ted interpreted Gerald’s involuntary movement as a reaction to some aspect of his critique of the recent obvious boob-job that has been undergone by Charlene in accounting. Gerald strove for a Zen-like blankness in the face of Ted’s renewed conversational enthusiasm and violently suppressed the urge to point out that ‘Charlene was just pregnant you mammary fixated Baboon’. ‘Mrs Andre the Giant’ finally opted for a dish of wobbly purple gelatin product and headed for the line at the checkout. Gerald grabbed a plate with a sad portion of Nanaimo bar on it and trudged after the She Hulk. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ted swipe something from the dessert options without really looking and scoot after his current monologue target.

After Ted waxed rhapsodic about ‘the rack on that hottie from the dancing show’ Gerald started to feel a little panicky. His parasitic hanger-on was very likely to start recounting every last detail of the long list of shows that he’d been so brilliant about stuffing on to his almost maxed out PVR. Fate however intervened.

The wife of one of the VPs, Gerald thought it was the one in marketing, pushed through the doors at the far end of the caff. She was following some pock marked Administrative lackey and in turn being followed by a young woman whom genetics insisted was her daughter. The girl was incongruously dressed in shorts and a demin shirt that was cinched at her solar plexus hoisting her ample bosom to be displayed to best advantage as none of the buttons above it appeared to be fastened. If she'd bothered to throw her dark locks into pigtails the illusion of Gilligan's Mary-Anne would have been complete. Very strange. She looked about her, at this likely shortcut in her mothers journey, as though the plebian café was a visit to some intensely toxic cesspit. Gerald did not care what the little tart thought of her predicament but couldn’t help but notice that Ted had short-circuited.

As Ted stood with mouth agape Gerald seized his chance and shot through checkout just giving the functionary at the desk a chance to punch his lunch card and then making haste for the out door eating area. His escape was complete as Ted couldn’t tolerate the sun. It saved Gerald the virtual certainty of hearing about Ted’s last visit to Vegas wherein he lost a certain amount of money and watched as much Porno as the Hotel could offer in one night.

Gerald sat down at one of the free bleak plastic tables and wondered what kind of world it would be if he had the wherewithal to invent a ‘Universal un-translator’. Surely there was a vast market of similarly tortured souls out there who’d leap at a chance to have no idea what their half-witted compatriots were blathering about. The thought amused him as he stoically consumed his too cool, too bland lunch and he scribbled down fanciful blue-prints of the device on his standard three napkins including a host of features and functions designed specifically to free long suffering users from the torment of utterly unwanted communication.

In addition to my getting a chance to sleep in a bit the weather today was quite summery and I decided that I just didn't feel terribly inclined to knock myself out in relation to the potential hammer of the sun. I did chores, puttered around in the gardens a little bit, did some cleaning inside and then opted for a bike ride. The thing is back in the spring we did the right things. I unboxed the bike rack we'd been gifted by friends strapped on the bikes and brought them in for a spring tune up. We talked about going for cycling trips more frequently (the whole reason we went and got her a bike last year) and naturally life conspired to make biking not happen. Granted in my case a certain amount of this is my inherent ability to surrender to inertia but it just seemed there was always something coming along to mess with 'the plan'.

With her out of town this past week I figured it was high time that I at least kick myself in the butt a few times and get to pedalling. Last year when I *finally* got myself in motion (bicycle wise) late in the summer I did a circuit around some of the back roads near our place. This is all fine and dandy in theory but the thing is I stupidly chose to ride along *heights* road as part of the endeavour. Needless to say after climbing the second hill in order to test my cardiac readiness I was tuning into the fact that I was a bit optimistic about my state of fitness. This time out I decided that I'd head off into town and then take the local rail trail out to a nearby bridge that is a convenient distance away to make for a small 'expedition'.

I decided to bring the camera after I discovered that I could in fact cram it into the small saddle bag strapped under my seat. I took a few pictures.

I suppose that I need to acknowledge the blessing and curse of riding on a trail that was formerly a rail bed. Because they are designed with the use of locomotives in mind 'rail trails' are happily devoid of hills and do their best to avoid sharp corners. This makes for pleasant riding, assuming you don't want the extra extertion, but it also means that some sections like this one can be long on monotony and short on interest.




Having said that former railway trails are straight and level and not terribly exciting there is always the possibility of an old trestle bridge to make things more stimulating. About eleven clicks away from my place is an old rail trestle that has been modified to cater to the trail use crowd. The old rail ties have been covered by a deck whilst a metal fence has been placed up in the name of safety.



Years ago, back before they managed to get some money to upgrade this old rail line I rode the length of it from my local Urban center out to the farm. It was much more challenging back then what with the fact that the old rail bed was unmaintained and had some pretty rough patches. Here and there along the twenty-five or so kilometers of it's length overzealous farmers had dragged up huge boulders to prevent access to the parts that happened to interesct their properties (although techinically the 'land' had reverted to governmental control). The most exciting part of the ride was of course arriving at the trestle and discovering that it was blocked by boulders as well. Like the farmer's improvised barriers I just picked up my bike and carried it around (or over) but unlike the other barriers this one then led to a walk across the trestle itself. I can recall quite clearly the sensation of walking on railway ties with a bike hoisted on my shoulder as I looked down to the creek quite far below.


The the bridge is deceptively substantial. You can ride across is in a few seconds but when I got there this afternoon I got off my bike to take a few pictures. I then walked the length of it and discovered that it spans just short of six hundred feet. The drop down to the creek that meanders through the valley is pretty close to a hundred feet. Having a deck on top of the old ties certainly makes it less alarming to cross.




It's hard to gauge distance in a picture like this but the fact that you are looking down on the tops of some substantial trees tells you it's a ways down.




With a blast of sunshiny weather starting off the month farmers are out in force trying to get in hay. Everywhere I went were the sounds of tractors and balers or field after field of bales waiting to be rounded up for storage.




Speaking of pastoral, near the trestle is a rolling field that looks like it's probably used for grazing and I think is quite picturesque. It's hard to do it justice with the camera although the White Pine near the trail is a decent focal point. A larger image might capture the fact that there are wonderful swathes of purple vetch and Vipers Bugloss colouring the green and yellow grasses. Real purdy.




One of the interesting features on the ride is this small bridge that arches across the old rail bed. Back when this was a railway it looks like the rail company had to allow for the fact that some of their lines went through large farms and in order to let the farmers access sections that were cut off by both the railway and steep embankments that were created putting in the rail line and they built them bridges for this very purpose. It's kinda nifty riding under these old very solid looking rail tie bridges serving property owners alone.




It may say something about the small part of my persona that is a manly man...but I really lust after the beams used in making this bridge.




Finally as I was getting near town on my way back I had to take a shot of this sign which strikes me a wonderfully ironic. On the face of it it just seems like a typical warning from a zealous property owner.




However, in context it seems to me that the circumstances of where the sign are have either changed or that the owners honestly thought that people passing along the trail would have nothing better to do than clamber over a fence and then wade through a fully formed swamp in order to get at the 'property'. Weird.

Todays theme, Flora and Fauna.

It's been a few years since we transformed the garden next to our garage and I must admit that as time has passed it was difficult to remain patient at times. For example the Hostas that we had planted popped up each year but seemed to be more or less stuck in the state they were in the previous year. I wondered if we were doing something wrong or if they just weren't happy where we'd planted them. This year has finally laid my concerns to rest and given me another abject lesson in how patience can pay off.




We have a small round garden out in the middle section of the yard that has really been coming together over the last few years. It has a number of 'clumps of vegetation' in it (and happens to be crowned by the lupin I displayed a while back). Among the more intriguing of these clumps are a couple of miniature tyhme plants that have spread out quite nicely from the tiny little knobs that they started out as. The flowers and greenery in this image spans a couple of inches at the most, making the clumps dense mats of intense green with little nuggets of colour.




I know that I've had a couple of pictures of the lilies in the pond but this afternoon when I was back there I couldn't help but admire the form of this bloom. Inspired thusly I lay with my stomach on the rocks around the edge of the pond and leaned out so I could take a shot using the camera's Macro feature. Quite a flower.



Every day in the last week I've been dragging my camera out to the Chicken gulag on the off chance that I'll get a good shot of the Tres Caballeros who have taken to being outside despite my misgivings. In fact I'd actually added a panel to the coop exit a couple of days after they arrived in order to delay their transition to the outside world. However the very next day after I installed the panel I was drawn to the coop by the distressed peeping of one of the little ones. I looked inside to discover that only one peep was actually in the coop. The other two whom I had been unaware were olympic level pole vaulters had cleared the quite substantial height of the obstruction and were outside with Mom. I managed to shoo them all back inside but within an hour the same situation was in effect with the only mortal chick stuck inside behind the chloroplast wall. I heaved a sigh and resigned myself to the cause of family unity and removed the barrier. Since then the chicks come and go as they please.


Speaking of family I thought this shot turned out relatively well with a few of the girls and Fred (our senior rooster) enjoying the shade in the rockpile found in the gulag.




None of the shots of Snowy and her brood turned out particularly well and while I was given them a rest from being followed by me trying to get a good picture I aligned the camera through the chicken wire to snap this shot of our demon child. Finny was in the barn eating so naturally Snippet was pacing around in the paddock annoyed that she didn't have anyone to boss around for a half hour. It is obvious to me in this shot how much 'power' the little *ahem* (message redacted) exudes. Can you see the percheron? I can!




Finally, while I sat waiting for a good shot to come along one of our Rhode Island Red hens hopped up onto the shady rocks and defied me not to take a shot of her shadowy chickenness...or is that chickeny shadowness?

Here at journey’s end I find myself rather irritated at the shape of things. It had started long ago after I’d arrived on the shores of a land of mystery having drifted about in a fog of misunderstanding on an ocean of uncertainty. Having debarked from my vessel I made my way across wide inviting grasslands of welcome. The fates smiled on me and travel was easy. Easy for a time at least. Eventually the grasslands failed and I soon stood at the eaves of a dark forest of foreboding, it’s tangled trunks and limbs bound together in a twisted wall that defied my entry.

I was unfazed. I produced implements of progress and hacked my way forward, the deep gloom yielding only grudgingly. In that slow dark part of the passage I found wellsprings of inspiration and remote solitary glades of comfort. The deepest parts of the forest held thickets of resistance and all but invisible, meandering trails of confusion. Armed as I was, however, I persevered and eventually broke my way through the now thinning stands of annoyance to find myself on the banks of a swift, wide river of freedom.

I set to the trees nearby and had soon fashioned a raft of invention with which to ply the waters. The current bore me away with great alacrity and soon I found myself free of the forest altogether. The river slowed and as the days passed I did my best to contend with a wide featureless expanse in plains of boredom. Late one evening as a dozed on my raft, wondering if perhaps I would be best served abandoning the waterway I became vaguely aware of a strange droning sound. The heat of the day had yet to dissipate and I was slow witted, a faint mist of torpor clung to the water. I lolled on the edge of sleep when a brisk wind of realization raced upstream but before I had the presence of mind to act I was borne over a great waterfall of calamity.

My possessions were washed away, my raft was smashed and the river veered north toward icy lands of entropy for which I had no use. Behind me reared a massive rift demarking the plains of boredom from what was clearly my impending destination, the hills of immediacy. I traveled blindly for days unable to be confident of my way with each crest and gully obscuring the distance and making me rely on the sun’s wavering light of certainty.

I must have drifted South after a time as I almost stumbled into the twisted coolies and valleys that made up the badlands of destruction. I corrected course and plunged back into the hills, satisfied that although I could not see far, I was not truly lost. Some time later this path proved true as a long winding climb found me standing somewhat smugly at the lip of the great mesa of achievement. The tableland was verdant green from recent rains and was full of life. The vegetation of plenty and creatures of fancy made that part of the journey a pleasant one.

Eventually the plateau narrowed and again off to the south I could make out the distant gleam on the spires of the vast city of hypocrisy and delusion. I had heard that many were lured by those gleaming spires, their brightness such that the viewer often failed to see the blanket of smog hovering over them, belched up by factories of greed and hate.

I turned my face away from the city and marched along the rapidly narrowing land until I found myself upon the edge. For as far as I could see the edge was sheer, falling some distance before being mitigated by a slope composed of a loose scree of poor reassurance. Faced with the prospect of a long march toward either the safer slopes of postponement or the roadway to the city of fools I made a leap of faith. The thin scree supported me, just barely, and I tumbled down, at the mercy of the fates until I came to rest in a small gully of calm.

I collected myself and after a brief rest, set off across a short prairie of ease. It gave way quite abruptly to the foothills of resistance. After a winding torturous journey through those hills, I began to see the first signs of distant snowcapped peaks. The mountains of despair. As I drew nearer I struggled to maintain my resolve in the face of bitter winds of discomfort and the gleaming faces of cliffs of futility. The foothills marched up to those sheer walls where I found narrow boulder fields of reality that were littered with the debris of shattered dreams. I forged north and wandered for days confronted by gullies and cliffs and false valleys of mockery.

There, on the verge of turning back with my soul at lowest ebb, I discovered a sudden valley of hope. It clove the mountains and flanked a bright clear stream of sincerity which I partook of in that, my hour of need. The flow of water led me ever upwards winding through channels of treachery and past the entrances to caves of false promise. Finally the watercourse was reduced to a babbling brook, leaping and gamboling down a steep greensward above which there was nothing but sky. I clambered up and gave a great shout for I had indeed discovered a pass of triumph. I thought, perhaps in my enthusiasm that I could just make out the distant glimmer of water.

The pass led down now into another valley, that of simplicity and another small stream of reassurance. I raced forward now and found the stream had swelled into a river of elation upon whose banks I found a strange and solitary boat of convenience. As the valley gave way to the coastal land of luxury I was forced to abandon the boat as the river of elation fanned out into a delta that was in fact also a fen of misdirection. I skirted the fen and eventually found myself here on the headlands of decision.

The sun gleams in the west and although I think back on the accomplishment of my great journey I am assailed by a kind of doubt and irritation. Something about the water, the way it moves, the way it *feels* tells me that after all of this I am once again confronted by an ocean of uncertainty.

What with the contractor having arrived at precisely eight in the morning I didn't exactly get much of a chance to snooze after my alarm went off. I'd been reasonably smart about the situation and crashed early enough so that I wouldn't be too sleep deprived and managed to not bang into too many things. It turns out that the fellow who'd been here for a couple of days is going to be off tomorrow and he wasn't sure if someone else was going to be showing up in his place. At the same time her car is ready at the dealership and I really should try to get into town to pick it up. Seeing as how I have the option of a ride at yet another foolishly early hour tomorrow I'm gonna have to keep this one short and shoot to crash promptly.

Happy garden news is that it rained in the AM and the gardens got a nice quarter inch of rain to water everyone who might have wanted watering. This is a good thing considering we're now in for three days of bonified summer with high twenties (verging on thirties with the humidex...blech) and blazing sunshine. Naturally I shall very likely be taking the opportunity to do some more gardening work that needs doing...yippee!

So...today's walkabout yielded a few images which follow.

We've got this Rose bush that clearly has aspirations to be a tree what with it being over seven feet tall. This image is taken with me holding the camera above my head and still pointing up for the best shot.




Way down near the bottom of the plant I was mildly irritated to discover that we have a number of guests on this particular rose bush who thinks it's good enough to eat. Sadly for them I met this discovery with a bout of a game I like to call, fling the caterpillar. Sure it's not one hundred percent effective but it is satisfying.




Over in the pond, betwixt the two new lily blooms I discovered this amphibian who looked very very relaxed. I quite like how the surface tension of the lily pad is distorting the water around his resting place.




In the one of the garden plots I ended up leaving in a row of parsnips that were left over from last year. The folks at the Ecopark indicated that blooming parsnip is one of those things that attracts beneficial insects. These parsnips sure seem happy...what with their blooms stretching up at least eight feet into the air. I wonder how those attracted insects are going to have any dealings with the surface world *waaayyyy* down there.




Back in the spring I ended up digging up the little herb garden next to our back deck as it had been significantly overrun by mint. By the time I was finished I must have removed something like two wheel barrows of roots. I then moved two clumps of the mints over to the other side of the stairs where by all accounts they seem to be happy. It should also take a couple of years for the spearmint and peppermint to start creeping back toward the garden some five feet away.




As has been the case for the last few years we're having another red currant bumper crop as evidenced by this shot which I took lying on the ground looking up at the berry goodness.



That is all...

I suppose I should be grateful that I didn't just lay in my bed this morning, semi-paralytic and flop about moaning in pain. Still, there were times during the day that I felt as if that state wasn't really all that far removed. I did move, albeit quite slowly, and managed to get working on a few things that needed doing. It's not like that work rushed to completion but I was pretty chuffed about being able to do pretty much anything. It was something of an accomplishment to get up at seven in the AM and haul my keister out of bed to the truck so's I could return the chipper to the rental place. I then rushed home in order to be around for when the contractor was due (which hadn't really been arranged and lo it was about five minutes after I got home). I then spent an hour or two feeling a bit woozy...methinks I may have been a teeny bit sun-whacked from yesterday.

The end result of everything was that I managed to putter around and take a few pictures and start using those woodchips and put down some water for the plants that were most likely to use it. As it stands with a few days of *dry* under our belts the gardens already look like they could use a drink and I'm hoping that the big system that's rolling past to the south of us will nudge up just a tinch so's we can get showered as well. I have a sense that my coherence is likely to be fading fast so I'll get to commenting on the impending images and head for bed (what with the contractor due bright and cheerily at eight Eh-Em).

So after everything was said and done we ended up with a pile of chips about three feet high by eight to ten feet long. The sad thing is that the job I'm doing with nuking the grass betwixt the gardens is eating this stuff up in a hurry...sigh.




Meanwhile in the gardens many things are growing apace. I just spread fertilizer for the peppers and tomatoes and did a little weeding here and there. Our bean teepee is actually showing signs that it may get used as intended with one plant (that had been inadvertently started indoors *way* ahead of the game) jumping out to a huge lead.




Back in early May (maybe it was April) I ended up digging up a small apple tree that had sprung up hard against the trunk of it's parent. For the last couple of years I've been meaning to do something about it but just never got my act togther. So...with just the first blush of leafing action I heaved a great sigh and set to wrenching it out. For a few weeks the little leaves that were on it seemed to strain to stay in the game but eventually shrivelled and fell off. I figured it was a goner but had other things to worry about and let it be. Not that many days ago as I was doing the rounds on the mower I detected hints of green and lo...new leaves have appeared...it looks like that wee apple is a tough little beggar.

A detail of those wee leaves.




Over in the same area of the yard as the apple (at least on the same side of the veggie garden) resides the Montmorency cherry we planted last year. As you can see here it's already intent on bearing fruit. Sure it's a whole dozen cherries (the Montmorency are *tart* or *sour*) but still...a big *A* for effort. No doubt we should have pinched all those flower buds to promote more *growth* growth...but it was too exciting to see actual fruit developing.


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Hoo Boy,

At this stage I'm thinking I'll be pretty happy if I can *walk* tomorrow. Perhaps some gentle gardening will be in order.

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