a seed, an ant, and everything inbetween

 

I've changed.

I realize that now.

I moved from the inner city of one of Canada's provincial capitals to a small mid-northern town 25 years ago, and from there, transitioned to a country home in a tranquil setting, complete with pond and forest. You can see shots of that beautiful acreage in earlier posts on this blog from 2010 through the 1st half of 2012  if you to the blog archive on the sidebar.

 

In 2 weeks, we will have been in Nova Scotia for ONE YEAR!! Happily we have a semblance of rural life out our backyard, and how we relish it!  Living anywhere new will change one. Most of the people on the planet gravitate to large cities. There are all kinds of pro and con statistics based on everything from health to education, employment to leisure, and so the choice becomes personal.

 



As for me, I get excited when I see a seed.

This is a so-called seedless watermelon. Do you ever see seeded watermelons anymore? I don't.

 

I once heard about a giant company that sells seeds to vast factory farms and penalizes the farmers who stray from using their hybrid, guaranteed-to-grow a seedless, pretty product thus expanding their monopoly, but also risking the loss of variety that could help ride a species through disease or a particular infestation. The manufacturing of homogeneity risks the loss of indigenous and/or variety that makes the world a healthier place to live in. And don't get me started on pesticides and herbicides that poison the earth, ground water, streams and eventually leach into larger bodies of water, all places from which we get our drinking water.

 

I'm so grateful to live beside a field in fallow i.e. one that grows wild and natural, with no farm chemicals on it, no industry that fills the valley with pollution...

 

Edgefield

There is a lovely shoulder of wildness that grows between us and the field

 

There are so many wonders to see if one has the patience to look-

like this lupin gone to seed

 

 it's hairy dry pods will cast seeds for next year's field of glory

 

(sometimes it seems like it's me who's normal; it's everything else that's crooked :)

 

a glorious goldenrod

 

The backlit and shadowed leaves of the honeysuckle that we would have destroyed as an invasive weed had we not discovered its incredibly scented and articulated flowers last month

a hidden last honeysuckle bloom, sheltered under its protective leaves

 

and another surprise- the honeysuckle makes an orange berry considered "mildly" poisonous;

mildly is enough information for me to admire it from afar

 

The charm of a Creeping Charlie vine trailing from the centre of an old stump 

 

and more Creeping Charlie interwoven with pretty little burrs 

there was a delicate elegance to them that I admired

even their stems were covered in teeny little hooks that caught gently at my skin

 

And then it hit me! Because they were also growing around Forget-Me-Not Cabin I realized these were, ta-daa! Forget-Me-Nots gone to seed!

 

No wonder I was so taken with them

 

and they with me!

 

And thus another chapter closes, quite literally, with the loss of a special souvenir from my trip to Israel 40 years ago, when I bought several pieces of Hebron glass, most of which I gave away.

 

all but this amethyst-coloured vase which I knocked over and shattered in half

The words that came to mind as I was thrust into the moment, and carefully picked up the shards were "mine on loan"

 

When I retrieved it from the recycle bag to take a photograph of it, this ant immediately found it and began to sup I-don't-know-what off its surface

 

 I took several shots and only found this one as a parting gift, unbeknownst to me until I enlarged it,

a fitting metaphor for the insects' omnipresence on Planet Earth

and how small we really are

 

with that in mind, let's take care of it and each other