writer at play
It’s been getting up to 90 degrees around here (and that, my friends, is hot for Vermont in May!). My tulips in the snow header picture was looking more and more inappropriate by the day so I swapped it for this one of a celandine flower. Yellow suits May so much better than snow. 
Last picture post of tulips, I swear! (Until next spring that is…!)
I took this picture from on top of our garden wall, looking down at the tulips. I love their cheerful yellow centers in this one.
Tulips nearing the end of life, more open, flamboyant, bruised and shiny.
Half a tulip, revealing the insides. There’s a clinical, more subdued feel to this image. I love how the petals are framing the stamens and the style.
And that’s it for tulips. Next up… dandelions! 
The weirdest thing happened to this post! My tulips completely disappeared between when I went to bed and when I got up and got replaced by a post I’d been drafting. How’d that happen?? Tulips again:
Tulips today
Tulips on Saturday
I’ve been terrible about posting pictures (I’m even worse about taking them off the camera in the first place!). The pretty part of fall is almost over, with most of the trees having turned and shed their foliage. It hasn’t been the best of seasons, with a lot of rain and a freakishly early snowfall. But without further ado, I’ll let the pictures do the talking:
D. took this one of flowers… berries… nature things
Not much is going on the garden right now. I dug up the pea plants and the lettuce since their time was over. I have green beans flowering and producing:
and some teeny weeny tomatoes:
I’m still dealing with slugs but this late in the game, I may have to declare a truce. I’d like to go all scorched-earth on them, but I don’t fancy salting my soil and burning my plants in order to do that. There’s always next year, and a better defensive strategy. Each year I garden, I learn a little bit more.
These are not growing in my garden, but you know how I can never resist pretty flowers!
My right brain is a magpie. It likes pretty pictures and shiny things. It thrives on drama, loves to touch things it shouldn’t, plays in the sand, is fascinated/repulsed by fungi and gets very excited over news reports of giant squids. Since this is where some of my best writing and my neatest ideas come from, I indulge my right brain as much as I can.
Right Brain loves landscape pictures. It loves the way the camera captures height and breadth and depth; it loves the colors, the lighting, the textures, the emotions. Here’s an exercise for using these images to inspire Right Brain.
Browse through these pictures, and pick one that leaps out at you. It might be hard to pick just one, but the others aren’t running away. You can go back to them later.
Take a good look at the picture and start pinging Right Brain with questions. Here are a few to get your started, with my answers for the picture I picked.
How does this picture make you feel? What adjectives spring to mind when you look at it? A sense of loss. Of things prematurely taken away. Desolate, fragile, threatening (personal and universal), sad, cold-killed, lull between storms, silent weeping, frozen tears, broken, snapped. Something bad has happened but it’s not over yet.
What’s the one thing that strikes you most about it? That broken tree with frosted branches sweeping the ground like hair. Slender and trailing, it reminds me of a girl. A broken girl.
What’s beyond the edges of this picture? Where does the road go, what’s behind the mountain, what’s hiding in the trees? Some kind of storm, waiting to pounce. There are other trees, too, but they are too far away, too far to have sheltered and protected this one. There is a village nearby, gouged into a cleft, hiding from the storms, and a lake.
Put a character in this picture (human, alien, animal, personification, whatever). why is it there? What is it doing? The tree itself is (was) a character. It was woman once, and there is a woman now staring at it. A woman who sorrows for the tree, and fears and rages that she must now transform and take its place. The trees are protectors of the village, but they are losing their battle against the elements, dying young.
Right Brain is taking the Apollo & Daphne myth and giving it a twist, turning the transformation into a duty, part of a battle strategy, instead of a flight response. It’s pinging me with words–rooted, matriarchy, mother trees, sister huts, children, cold rage. I have the germ of an idea, a seed pearl of a story.
These are just starter questions. Let the answers you get guide you to the next set of questions. Keep them simple: Who? Why? What? When? How? Your response to this picture might be the inspiration for a new story–or at least, a fun creative writing exercise.
More picture spam! A few weeks ago we took advantage of a momentary lull in the rain to take the kids out on a local trail for a hike. I got a lot of pictures but I won’t inflict them all on you (how lucky can you guys get??). So, without further ado, here is the world according to… me.
I have this fascination with fungi. Really. They’re revolting and creepy in a can’t-look-away sort of way. I’ll spare you all my shots of artist’s cap(s), except for just this one:
And here’s a shot with a branch down the middle of it. I think it’s interesting.
We hiked through a ravine to where there was a (supposed) cave. We saw the sign for it, but not the cave itself. D. decided to go wading through all the vegetation to see if he could find the cave. The baby, having no choice, went along with him. I really like this picture, because man, do I love those two guys in it!
And here’s this twisted gnarled tree trunk. Can you see anything in it?
And lastly, here’s the porcupine we spotted just off the trail.
Oh wait. I don’t have a picture of the porcupine. I watched that thing waddle up a relatively clear slope for several minutes and completely forgot that I had a camera around my neck. Doh!
Check out these pictures my sister-in-law took while on a work trip to New Orleans. They’re a good reminder that people are still rebuilding their lives down there, even if Katrina is old news to the rest of us. It never ceases to amaze me how easily lives and places are wrecked, and how long it takes to recover from that.
And that is all the profundity I can give you tonight. It’s been a long several days. We lost a car, bought a car; picked fourteen pounds of strawberries; washed, destemmed, dried, froze and turned to jam those fourteen pounds of strawberries; went to swim lessons and piano lessons and church and doctors’ appointments and playgrounds; ran the dishwasher and washer an obscene amount of times… and my house is still wrecked and a friend is coming over tomorrow, but the second season finale of Battlestar Galactica calls, so adieu, gentle readers… Till next time.
I enjoy taking pictures of flora. Unlike small children, they are not a constant blur of motion (Sir I.), do not scowl and hide their faces behind their hair if you try to take a picture of them (Miss M.), and are not constantly trying to attack your camera (the Baron). I snapped these shots on a recent walk around town:
Daylily. They are so pretty and they grow around our yard without me having to do anything to help them along (besides keep the hooligans away).
Small purple flowers (anyone know what these are?)
Small white flowers. I’ve narrowed this down to Queen Anne’s Lace (not as full as most of the Queen Anne’s Lace I’ve seen) or water hemlock (highly poisonous, highly unlikley, since this was taken by a roadside, not near a stream). Or is it yarrow? *throws up hands*. Whatever it is, nobody touched it, nobody ate it. I was the only one to stop to take a shot.
And, here’s a daisy (or is it an aster??) that we saw out on a hike through the woods. I like this picture, even though it looks like the flower is suspended in midair.
Anyone else care to share flower pictures from their current habitats?
Check them out at my sister-in-law’s photography site. That handsome baby getting a kiss from his lovely cousin? That’s my little charmer. Eight months old and one happy baby.
Thanks, Robin, for taking such great pictures of our wonderful vacation!
