Although I had my iPhone and sketchpad, I didn’t take one photo or do one drawing on our weekend away. It truly was a few days of doing very little, focused on being together.
We did lots of reading, (I finished Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea and started Kelly Links’s short stories White Cat, Black Dog) napping, and eating good food.
Back home, so much is the same, so much has changed.
We stopped at a nursery in Vermont and Jon got some more flowers for his garden. He wasted no time planting them. When one of the blossoms fell off his begonia he saved it for me knowing I’d want to put it in water.
In the house, I filled up a small blue jar with water for the flower.
That’s when I saw the bright yellow bird, on the Pinkster bush out the kitchen window. I watched it hop from one branch to another and suck a bright green caterpillar into its mouth. It stayed long enough for me to observe its markings and discover it was a Yellow Warbler.
After bringing in our bags and letting the dogs out, I went around the house opening the windows. I found this dead Milkweed Tiger Moth in the dining room window. I wasn’t surprised to find it, because just outside the dining room window, a few milkweed plants are growing in the Hosta patch.
The donkeys greeted us at the gate. I noticed right away how much Lulu had shed because I could see the white around her eyes. I bushed off handfuls of her and Fanny’s hair.
Before filling up the water bucket, I fished this beetle from it. It was so small I thought it was a gnat. Only when I focused my iPhone on it could I see it was a beetle. It was tiny enough to have to walk up and down the wrinkles on my fingers.
I was delighted to see it flutter its wings before drawing them back in again.
And when I opened the barn door, a pigeon flew off the nest. I climbed up the ladder sure that I’d find two more pigeon eggs. And there they were, two pinkish eggs in a clean nest refurbished with hay from the barn floor.
But the pigeons aren’t the only birds laying and hatching eggs.
I heard the familiar chirping when I went to muck out the barn and as the barn swallow swooped past my head, I looked up and there were two scrawny heads with wide open beaks stretched over the edge of the nest.
Now we’re all unpacked and the clothes are drying on the line. We’re home, but I feel like we’re still on vacation time. Jon is napping surrounded by the dogs, I think I’ll join them.
