Meandering Monday

I don't know how I missed this, since this is the second year I've been here. My only excuse is that I never go to the side of the yard. But there it was, like something that might be stumbled on in the middle of a forest where you only thought you were lost...

With trees this size, it's not hard to imagine where those pieces come from...

There is a pine tree in the yard that I'd need a very different camera to capture the whole thing, but looking from the closer view, I saw this moss. Having grown up with trees festooned with Spanish moss (from which we'd make wigs, beards, nests), it was good to see this. I don't know what kind it is. Surprise! But it is pretty.

Looking up from the tree and out across one of the fields. The cows sort of put in perspective what sometimes seems smaller or larger than it really is. I'm not hard to fool that way...giving lie to the cliche 'I won't believe it until I see it.'

Bees are everywhere here. A lot of people keep bee hives and bottle honey. While of course we have bees at home and sometimes there are enough to make a dull roaring sound in my yard when something or other is in bloom, the bees here seem faster, busier, as if knowing the short season they have to gather nectar.  Weed flowers, corn, berry blossoms, herb blooms, the spiky plant that looks like our aloe blossoms but isn't, the one the hummingbird loves - it doesn't matter. Anything that might bear a bit to take home to the Queen is used. There's a lesson there, I believe, but you can figure it out yourselves if you like.

Today, picking blackberries, I was thinking about a subject I often think about...rabid adherents to the Tea Party. I'm so unable to get behind their motivations, but I try sometimes. As I picked the berries and got into the zone of it, I realized that I'd gotten to the point (far from an expert or even highly efficient berry picker) that when I got to an especially dense part, a part where I couldn't actually look the berry over for perfect ripeness, I could come close to knowing by feel. You can barely touch the berries when they are just right, or they will fall on the ground, leaping out of your fingers, sprung free. So you have to go gently (not my forte'), so gently, that you really don't think of anything but the berry, that one berry that is so beautiful, that you can glimpse but not really see.

And later, I thought, maybe that is something those seemingly uneducated (as in, read any history lately?), narrow minded and rather dull people go through. Maybe they are so focused on that one thing that they really can't see that anything outside of that framework is too much for them. Maybe after coming home from whatever their means of income is, they just want to blame someone for their unhappy lot, and have someone with the power that seems to elude them, tell them what to think, but even more, to fix 'it' - the elusive IT, that would make every berry make sense.

Or maybe not. Maybe I should stick to trying to bake good bread that rises as well as tastes good!

Rosemary Garlic (flat)bread

Have a mighty Monday! Do something matchless.