Today Jesse Welles drops a new song based on the Siddhartha novel. Beautiful. This, and my Tattered and Blue post from February suggest I need to reread the book.
The ginger lily behind our bedroom brings me joy.
This was last Saturday as we scrubbed the cypress siding of accumulated dirt and mildew after this rainy year.
This bush has been busy with butterflies this week.
This extended music video (58 minutes!) by Jesse Welles is a treat. And damn if his upcoming shows over the next year are already sold out. But I did snag 2 tickets to his show in Boise. Luckily, I have family there.
I don’t have my Zuiker Chronicles blog streaming here, so I’ll just note that this week I’ve written posts about my first soccer goal (in 1982), a thought-provoking musical about how death row injustices affects family members, and learning from the writer Wendell Berry. Find these on zuiker.com.
Optimo makes beautiful hats in Chicago. They are out of my league. But I can dream.
Sitting on the porch with my morning coffee, reading: Think Little by Wendell Berry. Behind me, a pileated woodpecker is tapping at a dead upright branch of an oak tree.📚
Visited the Durham record stores today looking for new album by local Americana musician Joseph Decosimo but neither store had it yet so I walked out with Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago. Record sounds great in our house.
Caution signs are up. Rains keep coming. Turtles are on the move. Anna saw this one as she left for the Durham Bulls game this evening.
Family dinner (fennel-crusted tuna and broiled lobster tail) to celebrate our anniversary tomorrow (29 awesome years). I decanted the good bottle from Chimney Rock, which Erin and I visited in November. Good meal, great wine, a marriage to be grateful for every minute of every day.
Red chanterelles in the forest by my house. With all the rains these last weeks I haven’t done any exploring. Hoping to get out tomorrow for a walk of discovery.
Rainy day, another turtle crossing the road. This one a small female. I’ve received a few of these cool signs and will put them along the road this weekend to warn our drivers to go slow and watch for my favorite creature.
On plane to Texas, I read profile of pediatrician Greg Gulbransen and liked this graph:
Good people are often puzzles to those of us who wish we were better. We try to understand what they do, and how, and why. Many base their goodness in principle, or faith, or some vision of how the world ought to be, and we sometimes suspect that, if we could only adopt one of their systems, we might do good, too. But Gulbransen’s goodness wasn’t part of any system; it was personal, even arbitrary.
Wildlife seen in West Texas this weeked: kit fox (see earlier post), tan rat snake near our airbnb and long red racer (western coachwhip snake) along a gravel road, then porcupine (roadkill), roadrunner, havelina (roadkill) on US-90, and this cactus longhorned beetle near the horses.
Just before our departure this morning, Katherine took us outside Marfa for a bit of sightseeing.
Stenciled message on door of ruined house, Marfa, Texas. I bought a bottle of Mexican sotol from the surprisingly well-stocked Cactus Liquors in town.
After dinner and art at Capri last night, on our way to our room at the cool BOHEMIO Raconteur Lodge, we watched a fox cross the road. This article from Marfa Public Radio (Katherine’s husband, Tom Michael, was a founder of that station) says “kit foxes are America’s smallest canid.”