The Picture of Happiness

I pined for a Nikon camera, nothing fancy or weighty, just a point-and-shoot with a few bells and whistles, and around 2004 finally bought a Nikon Coolpix and loved it: great optics, a 4x zoom lens, a close-up option for intense nature photography; and I got a tripod, too, and with them snapped hundreds of gorgeous nature photos, turning some into calendars custom-made and lovingly sent 1) to my parents, who hated the calendars; one year I included a dramatic, unbeatable photo of a blacksnake, and photos of turtles, and close-ups of mushrooms, and a green bug on a pink flower; I had no clue they'd be so repelled and offended, and 2) the couple who lived on this Divine property just before me. They liked the calendars.

I hung the camera by its strap near the door, to grab when I saw deer, turkeys, sunrises, orioles & that. I'd owned other, heavier cameras, SLRs with multiple lenses. The Nikon felt so portable and good in my hand! It had a 256MB memory card, and no wireless capability. Around 2013 or 2014 its electronic shutter got gummy. It was not worth the repair. Besides, we now all carried cellphones with built-in cameras.

Realized when trying to photograph the Moon the other night how I missed the little Nikon and steady tripod mount. (The difference between amateur and wow-factor photos is the use of a tripod. )

 

Often I had thought to sell or throw away my tripod but didn't. Someday, someday. It waited patiently in its box for years until today, when I mounted on it a used Nikon Coolpix, purchased on eBay, one configured and operated very much and delightfully like the old one. Could have bought the latest model for about four times the money. Decided to see if I could again love photography enough to haul a tripod around and sit in the cold to wait for the ideal light, or wait an hour  to snap the just-right bluebird photo.

 

The 256MB memory card is now 8GB and that will be nice. Yes, to download I'll have to run a firewire between the camera and computer. So.

Here is my setup to take a photo of tonight's blue moon. I could just cry for all the time I missed my former Nikon camera, and for joy that I have one again.

Down the Road a Piece: A New Bridge

Since 2001 a thousand times on walks I crossed that crumbling concrete asphalt-topped Doc Sargent Road bridge across the creek, maybe 15 feet wide and 18 inches deep at that point, and maybe 50 times I waded beneath the bridge to hunt fossils, once scooping up a crawfish that bit me, a couple of times treading quicksand, and then after a storm one of the two ducts under the bridge got clogged with sand, and at the next serious rainstorm the mild-mannered LaBarque Creek began flooding in a foaming hurricane rush like I'd never seen, tore up stuff, then two years later did it again.

They're replacing that bridge. (Here's my 2018 post with a photo of the old bridge.) Work began in August. At 7 a.m. weekdays they're backhoeing and scooping and whatnot. Naturally I wanted to see, went over and asked a construction worker when they'd finish. He said, "Round Christmas." Here are some pictures. Where the bridge was is a tangle of naked, rusted rebar.

Considering that those toothpick-and-tar-paper new McMansions are built in two weeks from start to finish, they must be building a very good bridge here. Notice the pure-white sand. That's the sought-after St. Peters vein of sandstone than runs in a strip from Minnesota to here, and is still mined today in Pacific.

Bread Snobbishness Is on the Rise

We couldn't go out to buy bread so we made our bread: the whole nation. Of course I've always done it; my bread-making machines, one large one small, are both more than 10 years old and treasured. Fresh bread flour brings out the taste of wheat, and there's nothing like it. For 15 years now when it's sleeting and people run to the store for "bread and milk," I pity them what they think is bread. 

When I finally crept out to the store, like, in June, there was no bread flour and only a foreign brand of yeast in one-pound vacuum packaging (brand name SAF), so I bought the SAF and went online to my favorite flour purveyor, King Arthur. (If there were a mill around here, I'd buy it here.) Bread flour was sold out. I signed their waiting list and waited.

 

Meanwhile I bought healthy-type grocery-store breads: 12-grain, whole wheat, nuts and seeds, sometimes Jewish rye. When the two five-pound bags of King Arthur arrived from Kansas, I used them up. While waiting for more and again eating store-bought, I found I had become a bread snob. The bagels had no character. Squishy hamburger buns with dehydrated minced onion on top are not kaiser rolls. Sweetening syrup and preservatives marred the mass-manufactured health breads. My own (machine's) finest is its French bread. Or the pepperoni bread. Or is it the olive oil bread? The English muffin loaf? The flavorful "Cornell Bread" is a high-protein loaf scientifically developed for institutions. Its secret ingredient is one-third of a cup of soy flour. Enjoy during lockdowns.

Do you have an unused bread machine? Please don't fuss with sourdough! A machine will make every kind of bread! Beer, nuts, cheese, herbs, millet, caraway, challah, black bread, raisins. I used to mix dough with a wooden spoon, and knead and knead, and check rising dough every half-hour, but now everything goes in the pan, I press a button, then loll while it labors and bakes.

With cunning and stealth I obtained locally another two bags of King Arthur bread flour and two new bread-machine cookbooks. Blame the pandemic. I am also a fan of SAF yeast. Yes, I slice and butter and eat pieces of fresh loaves while they're still warm; that's why the picture shows the loaf raggedy where it's missing a piece.

Oh Brave and Faithful Plant

 

In late spring the baby basil plants were mostly sold, leaving only leggy and fragile ones. On the way home, the healthiest plant fell over and the stem broke. One shoot remained in that pot and two, undersized, in the other. The survivors all went into one planter because I expected to lose one.

 

I'm a good transplanter. No one else will ever know that except you and I. It is love. I love my basil annuals. Told them so and blessed them. Brought them indoors on cool nights. Moved them twice daily into the strongest summer light when the trees leafed out and cast shadows. A creature (squirrel?) always upsets and paws through the pot, but only once per season, usually soon after planting, as if to dash my hopes and grieve me. The basil always survives this. Looked up Saint Basil. Looked up Basil as a baby name. Breathed deeply. Scissored the leaves for cooking. Picked the flowering heads off so they'd keep leafing.

Today when frost is only days away I filled the chopper with garlic, olive oil, pine nuts and lemon, for pesto-making, and boiled clean a jar that held the store-bought pesto I buy when I must settle for less. (I've tried freezing, drying, and microwaving my basil harvest. Nothing but pesto works.) I thanked my plant for its beauty and fortitude as I picked off every leaf and the room filled with its sacred fragrance. This year I told it, "You are one of the great joys of my life."

Stars and Mars

Daylight veils and night-time reveals the most majestic sight of the planet Mars, like a huge red star, rising in the east soon after dark, dominating the sky. It's at its closest to the Sun right now, meaning that it's at its closest to us, and on the 16th was precisely aligned with the Earth and Sun. Oh! I tried so hard to get a photo showing how I felt when this planet appeared in the eastern windows each night, persisting, as if it wanted something. I'll give it! (This is the best my camera could do; there's a more awesome photo here.)

Dominating the southern sky not long ago were the two brilliant planets Jupiter and Saturn, so bright in the bedroom window that after settling in I got back up and went out to look at them. They're headed west, sinking soon after sunset. On December 21 (winter solstice!), look low in the southwest at sunset, and Jupiter and Saturn will be in a rare conjunction at 0 degrees of the sign Aquarius. This is also called "the Great Conjunction" and occurs every 19.6 years. Astronomers say that the star the Magi noticed and followed was a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction.

This 2020 at least the planets are with us and want to entertain us!

Everyone Talks About the Ozarks

 . . . but nobody can agree on where they are, their features and borders, how to define them, what to call them. We know they're there: I just look outside or go walking. But for everyone who needs or loves clarity, I have permission from the original poster, Explore the Ozarks LLC, to publish this pleasing map. Enjoy that chicken and dumpling dinner wherever you find it!

Sassafras Magic and Lore

Pluck
the mitten-shaped leaves from the sassafras tree, then snap their stems and inhale the warm spicy sweetness. Once a guest here dug up a root and we made sassafras tea and talked about how root beer, made with sassafras, used to be actual alcoholic beer, and that sassafras twigs used to be toothbrushes, and it's good for lots of other stuff. Like what, I wondered today, and looked up all sorts of lore:

• Every part of the tree is fragrant.
• A ship, boat, or bed made of sassafras wood will keep evil spirits away.
• Tuck a leaf in your wallet or business till to stretch the money you already have. I tucked leaves between the checkbook's and account book's pages.
• It's lucky to carry some dried sassafras root with you when seeking a job.
• Rub the leaves on wounds or skin eruptions as an antiseptic and anti-bacterial treatment. That'll probably work better if the leaves haven't turned their autumn yellow.
  
• Sassafras tea is a "toner," meaning it will enhance health. The U.S. banned it in 1960 but it has been legally available since 1994. The safrole in sassafras was carcinogenic in rats given huge doses. It is now thought that no human can ingest that much safrole even if they tried, and nutmeg contains safrole too. Most store-bought sassafras drinks use artificial flavor.
  
• Dried sassafras leaves, ground up, make that "file" stuff without which gumbo is not gumbo.
• Woodpeckers and wild turkeys like the fruits.
  
• There used to be a huge sassafras industry: American sassafras was exported to Europe, where the tree is not native. Europeans liked the wood for ships and furniture. They also used sassafras as a cure for syphilis.
• Germans used to call it "fennel wood."
  
• Sassafras is the "triple goddess" tree because any one plant can have three kinds of leaves: ovate, single-lobed, and multi-lobed.

You read it here first, or second!

Happiness is a Warm Gun

I'll call it guano. Birds at my feeders left several spots on my porch screens, and just as you don't leave guano on a vehicle or your hat you don't leave it on aluminum screening either, for more than a season. The screens are beneath the eaves and rarely washed by rain.

Removing each screen and spray washing each with the hose was too much work. Spray washing the screens while they were in place, from the outside, would force guano inward onto the porch when that was the opposite of the goal. The screen frames are also old and fragile and the screening very delicately sandwiched between their pieces -- can't power-wash. And when the porch walls get wet the paint peels.

Rooting through the garage found me the answer: the old plastic-embedded-with-glitter "Splash" squirtgun, one of two. The pink squirtgun I'd favored got clogged with hard-water residue. This one still worked, and I'd kept it for 10 years thinking someday I might need it, and smack my butt and call me Sally, after filling the squirtgun with warm water I stood inside the porch and with skillful aim squirted water outward through my screens and I was pleased as punch that probably no one else in the county did the exact same thing today.

That Blue October Sky

Try explaining how blue the October sky is, how it grips even the loneliest spots on Earth and in the mind until they glow and seem meaningful when the rest of the year we don't look twice. 

 

Driving home I saw this sight and could have kept driving but scolded myself, "Time was when you'd turn around, stop, park and stand in the road to take a picture to share with everyone so they could see what you see, feel the reverence, how great it is to live here and now. Is that time gone? Are you old or just lazy? Maybe taking it for granted? What about beauty? What about awe?"

 

So I found a place to park and backtracked up the road, walking past a field of dead sunflowers on long thick stems much taller than I, with weird little gray birds shooting in and out of them. I stopped and saw they were goldfinches, not lemon-yellow anymore but wearing their duller winter corduroy. High winds roiled the grasses and treetops and filled my ears. If a car were approaching I would have to feel it through my feet. But there was no other car and I got my photo. Happy October.