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Two short trips
May. 20th, 2004 01:13 amOn Wednesday, Raphael and I went for a hike. What with one thing and another, it's been a long time since we did that. We went to Carver Park Reserve, which despite its name is a Hennepin County Park. It was a perfect day, sunny with big puffy clouds, seventy degrees, a little breeze.
Not much was blooming; this is an interim time. We did see yellow violets, purple violets, a lone jack-in-the-pulpet, the beginnings of Virginia waterleaf, and a couple of plants we recognized but could not identify, one yellow- and one white-flowered. The butterfly garden was a collection of knee-high plants, not blooming, being worked on by a cheerful park person. I don't think we saw any other hikers, but we saw a number of park workers.
Carver is incredibly beautiful to me. It's not spectacular like, oh, the SF Bay Area or even parts of Wisconsin. It's gently rolling, part wooded and part prairie. A typical view will, at this time of year, show you a stretch of dead cattails with the new green just coming up; a slope or two of new green grass and summer-blooming plants not yet far along; a flat shining sheet of water decorated by geese; a line of trees, tall, short, round, columnar, at this time of year every shade of fresh green imaginable, their different leaves making even at a great distance a subtle difference in texture.
We saw newly-emerged clubtail dragonflies, green darners, several kinds of damselflies, and spiders. We saw orioles, the common yellow warbler, red-winged blackbirds, a gray catbird trying to sound like a red-winged blackbird, unidentifiable warblers, crows, chickadees, chipmunks, something I told Raphael was a mouse but that I realized later was a vole, Canada geese, mallards, and a white plastic bag caught in a dead tree that I mistook for an egret.
We heard spring peepers and at least one other kind of frog; a vast array of birdsong, including cardinals and house finches as well as the above-mentioned birds; and a barred owl, in broad daylight.
We've been to Carver many times, so we said, This is where we saw all the dragonflies backlit by the evening light, this is where we saw that snake moving over the lake scum as if it were as solid as the boardwalk, this is where we came on September 11th, this where we saw all those Halloween pennants.
We came home in late evening with the lovely light behind us.
Today David and I went to Northfield to see his mother. These trips are particularly valuable because there are two 45-minute drives for conversation. In Northfield, we admired the cat and the garden, exchanged news, ate pan-fried salmon and baked potatoes and salad and apple pie; and, David and his sister having already done so, I was given a pad of little brightly-colored Post-It's and told to put them into any books that I didn't want Mary to get rid of without consulting me. There was a thunderstorm; we left in what seemed like a lull, and aside from a few minutes of almost-blinding rain partway home, arrived home without incident.
I haven't done dishes or laundry. I've done some writing, but not much, and I've watched some stuff on TV with Raphael, but not much, and I've talked to Eric on the phone, very satisfactorily but not very lengthily.
Tomorrow I have to go downtown and get my drugs, and in the evening David and I are going to see "The Pirates of Penzance" at the Guthrie, courtesy of a kindly friend.
After that I am just going to stay home for a few weeks.
Pamela
Not much was blooming; this is an interim time. We did see yellow violets, purple violets, a lone jack-in-the-pulpet, the beginnings of Virginia waterleaf, and a couple of plants we recognized but could not identify, one yellow- and one white-flowered. The butterfly garden was a collection of knee-high plants, not blooming, being worked on by a cheerful park person. I don't think we saw any other hikers, but we saw a number of park workers.
Carver is incredibly beautiful to me. It's not spectacular like, oh, the SF Bay Area or even parts of Wisconsin. It's gently rolling, part wooded and part prairie. A typical view will, at this time of year, show you a stretch of dead cattails with the new green just coming up; a slope or two of new green grass and summer-blooming plants not yet far along; a flat shining sheet of water decorated by geese; a line of trees, tall, short, round, columnar, at this time of year every shade of fresh green imaginable, their different leaves making even at a great distance a subtle difference in texture.
We saw newly-emerged clubtail dragonflies, green darners, several kinds of damselflies, and spiders. We saw orioles, the common yellow warbler, red-winged blackbirds, a gray catbird trying to sound like a red-winged blackbird, unidentifiable warblers, crows, chickadees, chipmunks, something I told Raphael was a mouse but that I realized later was a vole, Canada geese, mallards, and a white plastic bag caught in a dead tree that I mistook for an egret.
We heard spring peepers and at least one other kind of frog; a vast array of birdsong, including cardinals and house finches as well as the above-mentioned birds; and a barred owl, in broad daylight.
We've been to Carver many times, so we said, This is where we saw all the dragonflies backlit by the evening light, this is where we saw that snake moving over the lake scum as if it were as solid as the boardwalk, this is where we came on September 11th, this where we saw all those Halloween pennants.
We came home in late evening with the lovely light behind us.
Today David and I went to Northfield to see his mother. These trips are particularly valuable because there are two 45-minute drives for conversation. In Northfield, we admired the cat and the garden, exchanged news, ate pan-fried salmon and baked potatoes and salad and apple pie; and, David and his sister having already done so, I was given a pad of little brightly-colored Post-It's and told to put them into any books that I didn't want Mary to get rid of without consulting me. There was a thunderstorm; we left in what seemed like a lull, and aside from a few minutes of almost-blinding rain partway home, arrived home without incident.
I haven't done dishes or laundry. I've done some writing, but not much, and I've watched some stuff on TV with Raphael, but not much, and I've talked to Eric on the phone, very satisfactorily but not very lengthily.
Tomorrow I have to go downtown and get my drugs, and in the evening David and I are going to see "The Pirates of Penzance" at the Guthrie, courtesy of a kindly friend.
After that I am just going to stay home for a few weeks.
Pamela
