No More Snow, Please

Old man, Mr Big Nose loves the snow.

Most mornings, Big Nose & myself walk along the school route.  See that young fella there with his head down, the one whose expression says he'd rather be in bed?

He'd be yet another anonymous school lad if it weren't for snow mornings.  The merest of white dustings & suddenly, he's cheery, chatty, not able to stand still.

Before emigrating, I battled mountain snow for years, & fervantly hate all snow now.  No clue why this boy chooses to share his snow glee with me, of all the dog walkers he sees.

Snow.  Bane of my existence.

1.  Snow will be tolerated on the holly.

It does look nice w/that dark green foliage.

2.  But look at my poor foxglove.

Long-suffering foxglove.

3.  The bergenia managed a brave face.

O, the indignity of it all.

4.  And I suppose the fatsia seed heads are actually improved.

Looking more alien than usual.

5.  But the snow brought it's no-good friend.  

Ice!

Confined to the glass top of the patio table.

The glass top has since been brought inside.

There'll be no sitting outside today.

Not exactly the hot seat.

6.  The witch hazel only lightly dusted.   

Snow witch.

Not that it worries about snow.  Actually, there's barely any snow on the witch hazel, but it's having such a great blossoming, it deserved to be featured here again.

Love at first sight.

So there are my Six.  Rather than end on a snow note, I leave you with something I love.  You may remember a few weeks back, I told the story of my crooked cherry tree.  The sight of it in full bloom, growing through a shrub, well how could you not give your heart to something like that.

As always, I remind you to visit  The Propagator who'll have his own Six, plus hosts links to a vast array of Sixes in his comment section.

Critturs & Thangs

Snow-loving Doodle.

I know you're out there, you folk committing wintery exploits in your gardens.  After a snow flurry on Thursday, I've kept to my warm living room.  However, there's critturs & other thangs in that garden of mine, let me tell you.

But let's start with what's not there.












1.  There's always been owls swooping through my gardens of the last 25 years or so.  Sitting in the trees.  Me at the base & them looking down on said inferior being.  Silent & calling.  Silent & calling.

Until now.  In this garden, I hear no owls, so my son got me this old woman of the night.

The only owl of the moment.

She faces the house rather than the garden, & can be seen through the downstairs bathroom window.

Watching through the window.

2.  Spiders were welcomed in my mother's house, their cobwebs untouched during house cleaning.  I, too, like a good spider, inside the house or out.  This gal in the next photo was in my garden but isn't now.

There were several of them conspicuously hanging around before the snow, stringing webs across footpaths, thinking they could catch me & make a tasty snack.  This lady in the picture below lived outside the dining room window.  I'd eat my breakfast & watch her lay in wait for hers.  Round about Wednesday, she disappeared.  When the spider goes, snow is coming, & that lady is gone gone.

Madam Window Friend

2.  There are few things that upset me as much as disrespecting my precious garlic babies.  As you can see, something's been a tad rough with them.  In the larger garlic planters, actual paw prints can be discerned.

Poor little abused garlic chillen.

Fortunately, this past spring, I bought a wildlife camera because there were some strange noises coming from the abandoned lot next door, coupled with a familiar musk on the morning air.

Now, thanks to that camera, I could track down suspects in the Great 2017 Garlic Babies Travesty.

3.  First, the vagabond cats.  Yes, despite Mizzy BunnyButt's most severe glares, some of these dared show their faces in the daylight.

The brazen ginger tom.

The more elusive feline intruders came at night.

The rare black & white fluff lion.

The greater spotted leopard tiger.

4.  Then Mizzy BunnyButt, curator of all things, pointed out a breach in the perimeter, perhaps connected to those musky spring sounds.

As Mizzy BB demonstrates, there's a tunnel under the fence.

5.  Which brings us to this fella.

Brer Fox

Footage shows that before Brer Fox ends his nightly visits, he hops up on various pots to inspect the garden from a higher vantage point.

As much as I love my garlic chillen, I love Brer Fox more.  His visits will be tolerated, but there'll be some sticks tucked in among the garlic to dissuade him from those pots.

Those are my six offerings for the week.  Thanks for stopping by.  Be sure to check out The Propagator for his Six & for other Six on Saturday links in his comment section.

See you next week!  Stay warm until then.

Austen & Twitter

Since last I wrote, we've celebrated the 200th anniversary of Pride & Prejudice, and my list of Twitter followers broke the 20 threshold.  The conglomeration of synapses which is my brain combines these two things to ponder the constant flux in culture.

I’m the one never given a Netflix vote in our house because inevitably, I choose a costume drama.  At sixteen, my favourite author was Tolstoy and even today, I’m not above causing a pained look on my son’s face by admitting in public that I really love Dickens.  Along the way, I’ve read everything Austen.

 

                                                           My current read.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m happy with my era.  While I quite fancy Georgian breeches, they in no way compensate for the lack of antibiotics.  It’s the effect of time and place on perception that intrigues me.  Who would I be, had I been born a hundred years earlier than I was? 

                                                   Obviously the hired help.

But cultural change happens today at a rate I imagine is unprecedented.  If you were walking down the street and overheard a conversation between two strangers, would you interject?  Would you interject abusively?  If you were at a party talking to an interesting person who changed the subject to something that didn’t interest you, would you walk away without excusing yourself?  

                                         Or would you cut off their virtual head?

These things happen on the internet all the time.

Being a newbie, the Twitter culture still fascinates me.  The  compression of complex communications into 140 characters, the etiquette, the sudden and truly wonderful connections with a wider community.  Followers come and go so quickly, it has nothing to do with me.  I’m the person followed, but the following isn’t personal.  When I post a blog pertinent to the texture and flavour of bananas, then I collect a banana enthusiast following.  When my next blog is about the evils which be snow, I lose banana followers and gain snow invasion conspiracists. 

                                                        Big Nosed dog rescue.

This may seem basic e-procedure, but it’s also a cultural dynamic.  With the information overload on the web, we have to discern and discard quickly.  It’s what our brains do in order to set aside the superfluous when there’s a tiger stalking us.  In fact, we have a wonderful ability to habituate and ignore irrelevant stimuli.  Stick a rose under your nose and see how soon you stop smelling it.

But . . . on the other side of the snow blog that you’ve rejected, there is a person.  We are changing the way we interact with and habituate people.  Don’t think I’m gearing up to rage about the erosion of society.  This is an observation on society in flux.  Just as I look backwards via Austen, Tolstoy and Dickens into an imperfect representation of their societies and try to imagine that experience, I look forward to myself growing old in a society that puts an electronic spin on interpersonal dynamics. 

So the Tolstoy loving teen that I was didn’t own a mobile and had limited access to the telephone because there was no call waiting.  Notes were passed, not text messages, and depending on the situation, might be confiscated by adults loitering in my environment.  Letters often took a week to arrive, were written on paper chosen to designate the level of intimacy with and personality of the sender AND the handwriting was as personal as the message inside.  Communication took time, attention to detail and could be attributed to its source.

Today, if you wait 24 hours to answer an emotion wrought text or email, you’re ignoring the sender, rather than giving it the weight you may think it deserves.  The generation growing up with electronic and instant communications has to field and respond at what my teenage self would have thought was an impossible speed.  There will be a trade off for this virtual age, but I believe humanity will still want to belong, will still want authenticity and intimacy in its relationships.  I hope I’m founded in that belief because I think it will be a singular challenge.

                              Unlike our excursions into the past, we won’t have a map.