"The Sky Is Falling!"

My grandmother has lived in a nursing home for six years. Ever since she moved, I have been responsible for her house. We mow the lawn, prune the hedges, remove the snow, clean the gutters and everything else that it needs. The house is located half an hour away from us, so sometimes this is a major headache, especially if the weather has been terrible. My husband is diligent about checking on the place, even when that means going there when the roads are bad. Friday night we had yet another inch and a half of rain in a matter of hours. So, he thought he'd better go check on the other house. I got a phone call from him right away, "You'd better come. We've got problems. Bring the shop vac. and every towel in the house." My heart sank. I loaded up the car and headed out. It took me forty minutes to get there this time through driving, blinding rain. There had been a leak in the upstairs bathroom which had taken out the entire living room ceiling beneath it. All the sodden plaster had fallen to the floor. The 150 year old birch floors we had painstakingly refinished a year ago were already buckling. My heart sank deeper. Toilet water was dripping and running from the ceiling and there was an inch of water across the floor. Mouse turds from decades ago floated merrily in the stream. It was a back breaking, disheartening evening of shoveling up mushy plaster and swabbing the curling floorboards. Even though it was pouring rain, we opened the windows because it was damper inside the house than out. I could almost smell the mold growing on the walls. Every book, the furniture (much of it dripping), the TV, everything had to be removed. Thoughts of Katrina went through my head. When we were as finished as we could be, I asked David, "Hey, since it's date night, how do you feel about Chinese take-out?" We really know how to have a great time. It keeps our marriage young.
Just before the phone rang, I had seen this young, Bald eagle land in a tree outside our living room. It was being harassed by Seagulls. I wasn't technically still in my bathrobe, but this was nonetheless, about as easy as it can get for a birding photographer. In case you think it's too easy for me, keep in mind that unbeknown to me, elsewhere, the sky was falling.

Good day, Sunshine!

I don't know how many days of sunshine we’ve officially had in Maine for the month of July, but I can tell you for sure that my count would be too few. The sun has finally been out for the past two days, but I think everyone is waiting for the other meteorologic shoe to drop. My weather station barometer says in fact, that it's going to rain. I’m not sure it actually will, though. There's an icon of a cloud with rain falling out of it and a downward pointing arrow. Perhaps it's been displaying that symbol for so long, that as it's mother probably told it, "Keep making that face and you'll get stuck that way!" Or maybe the weather station has finally cracked up, like the rest of us. This poor, Double Crested cormorant (a ‘DC’ in birding circles) is panting it's so hot! Birds do that when they are overheated or otherwise stressed. Most of them are smart enough to get into the water, though! Even David and I got into our pool for the first time this season. The sun brought everybody out and their laundry. This rental cottage sits across the cove from us. There is no electricity there, thus no clothes dryer. So, the minute the sun came out so did every wet towel and article of clothing this family possessed! And we had the first rainbow of the entire summer, though it too was quite washed out compared to years past. We see Hermit Island camp ground from our house. Every year when it rains I think of the poor campers, huddled in tents and standing around smoldering, damp fires, pretending they are having fun. We know a family that camped there every summer for eighteen years. For sixteen years, it rained. They finally bought a cottage here and paid a King’s ransom for it, too. Anything for a roof, they said. There is a certain amount of “street cred” to be earned in enduring this kind of thing in the name of fun and family bonding. I earned my chops this year when I went to Baxter State Park for the first time to see the moose cows with their calves. In the two days I was there, the park had a record ten inches of rain. The water levels were ten feet above normal, so no moose were to be seen. They had been driven to higher ground and away from their aquatic food sources. Either that, or they were all waiting it out at a bar in Millinocket, drinking beer and watching ESPN on a flat screen TV. This has been the year that even a moose might contemplate, “I think I’ll save up and buy a camp.”

Get Your Mind Out Of The Gutter

This is an Impatien viewed close-up. That’s all, but I know what you were thinking. It is the rare person who does not immediately think of the secret parts of the human form. Our second thought is, “Oh! Wait a minute - that’s a flower!” So, why is it that our response is “get your mind out of the gutter,” as if our first thought is a shameful place to be? Psychotherapists have made fortunes declaring answers to that question. I’ve been working on a project composed of macro shots of flowers and their intimate parts, the parts that jump out at us and make us squirm. There’s nothing subtle about it, either. I choose the most provocative elements, because they stir the moment of unrest that I want to evoke in the viewer. I want to shove you off your mark, to disturb you. Why is that? The simple answer is that it gets attention; the deeper answer is that I want to stand out from the crowd. I confess that I have always yearned to be somebody, though my secret fear is that I'll conclude my life in banal mediocrity. My intense dread motivates me to learn to do a lot of things, too. I belong to a photography focus group where progress on individual projects is reviewed and discussed. It has irked the hell out of me when presenting my project, that the frequent response is ‘Oh ya, like what’s her name………O’Keeffe, ya, Georgia O’Keeffe.” NO! Not her, me! Georgia O’Keeffe was wrongly accused. Art historians claim she did not intend her paintings of Calla lily pistils and labia like Hibiscus to be construed as pornographic. It was her husband, Alfred Stieglitz (ironically, a photographer) who promoted her work with that language. In fact, those works are not representative of her work overall, but simply those that are most popularly recognized. And why is that? Because, they are the works that jolted the masses, not her more subtle, complex abstractions. They are the works which scream to the thing that we all have in common, our bodies and its urges. So, that’s where I decided to start - no disguises, no fans, no feathers, no bubbles, just unabashed posy porn. I chose an impatien as my opening piece because they are possibly the most ubiquitous bedding (see, there you go again) plant. They take shade and full sun. They live confined in containers or sprawling on the ground. They reseed prolifically, mutate readily, survive neglect and outright abuse and come in every possible color. They are simple, beautiful. They may not be the most complicated, but they are the best known, the Barry Manilow of the flower world. I’ll take that kind of recognition. Unlike Georgia O’Keeffe, I’m not beating around the bush.

SOMEWHERE 2009

Here's a five minute video to cheer you up. It's a medley of wildlife and garden photography from the coast of Maine, mostly in Phippsburg. I took these shots over the past month, rain or shine. We have had record breaking rains and cloudy days, such that it's been brain crushing. I'm trying to be positive. The music is by Aselin Debison. She is preforming a medley, too. Her's is a combination of Somewhere Over The Rainbow and It's A Wonderful World (if you want to see the video full screen, click on the small square on the bottom right of the video screen).

Who's The Big Guy Now? Huh?

Big Guy 5.11, Indian Creek UT from wade david on Vimeo.

This is a short video (thanks to Wade David) of my son climbing a tiny crack called Big Guy in Utah. He has had climbing in him from when he was born, most probably. My first evidence of this was when I found sneaker prints on the cathedral ceilings of his bedroom. He was about ten years old. Then, around that same time, I found a trough gouged into the window sill outside his bedroom at 2 1/2 stories high. When I confronted him about the damage to the sill, he said he'd been repelling. "Repelling what?! Mosquitoes?!" Rock climbing was new then, so this was new language to me. He explained that he repelled out the window every day when he went to school. The trough had been abraded by his rope, he said. Sure enough, I had to admit that I had not actually witnessed him leaving the house each morning, but only seen him getting onto the school bus. He told me that after eating his breakfast, he left the kitchen, then went back to his bedroom and jumped out of the window. I don't know what was more shocking, that he jumped out the window every day and I never noticed or that he was using a length of cotton clothes line which I had discarded as not sufficient to hold the clothes on the line! I don't get this. I raised the boy on a clam flat and, personally, I don't like to ascend higher than what a step ladder will afford. But he clearly was somehow born to it. Some kids are good at math or science or music; my son was always good at climbing. His great-grandmother was born in Munich, Germany and forever considered herself a Bavarian mountain girl. Perhaps it's all in the genes, after all.

"Oh, She's A Man Eater!"

This lovely, diminutive wildflower is commonly called Yellow Bladderwort, a nasty moniker for such a pretty thing. It conjures all kinds of disgusting images, especially keeping in mind that I'm a Registered Nurse. This flower grows in freshwater billabongs and stagnant pools in many places in the world from Maine to Australia. The blossom is about the size of a dime. It rises above the water 8 inches on a thin stalk. Below the water lies the source of the name, a series of bladders entwined in filament like roots. The plant is not attached to the soil, but is free-floating. It was believed that these bladders kept the plant afloat, but not so. Utricularia macrorhiza is carnivorous. The bladders create a vacuum suction pulling in microscopic animal life. Once trapped, the animals are slowly digested by secreted enzymes. Gruesome! These flowers are so small, that I could only truly appreciate their beauty through my camera lens. I could'nt get close enough to see the details of the petals without it. I laid on a dock cantalevering my body out over the water. It was the kind of area where you could not pay me to swim. The Bullfrogs were chal-umping amongt the rushes and waterlilies while I tried to ignore the mosquitoes biting me. In the dark water, a few Bloodsuckers slithered by. If the Bladderwort was a bigger plant, this whole scene could make the screenplay for Jaws look like child's play!

Utricularia macrorhiza, Phippsburg, Maine

Is That You, God?

In their times of struggles, a couple of my friends have tried on organized religion. Desperate to plug holes gouged by fear and despair, they wore the trappings of church ceremony like single use prom dresses or ill-fitting jeans on wide birth bodies. I humored them, but thought them silly. What could I say? I envied their ability to grasp a hold of simple things to help them through their times of need. One of them now imagines her long gone mother as butterflies. The other sees her sister in Dragonflies. Me? I see nothing in nothing. I wish I believed otherwise; I wish I had some icon to hold me. Long ago, I had a nephew with Down’s syndrome. Joey died at ten from complications of Down’s. He was buried in Madawaska, Maine on a frigid April day. On a map, Madawaksa sits on the ‘crown’ of Maine, though there is nothing royal nor glorious about it. It’s an eight-hour drive through gloomy spruce forests and potato fields to nowhere. At the graveside, I stood shivering and watched his little casket lowered into a hole. Joey was a trial when he was alive. He was rough and crude, a thug. He needed watching around his cousins because without intending to he could hurt somebody. We accepted that about Joey. When one of the smaller cousins would wail that Joey had punched or shoved them someone would always say “that boy don’t know his own strength.” But, when he died, he seemed suddenly gentle. It was impossible to imagine him set into the hard, cold ground of Madawaska, Maine. That image has remained in my mind. I wish that I could exchange it for a butterfly or a dragonfly, silly or not.

Bluetail damselfly

 

Fritillary butterfly