Breakfast Alfresco

"What would be fun?" I asked myself and could not come up with an answer. This is very abnormal because I think everything is fun, from hikes to mud to old trucks to blizzards. How else could it be, living in the world's most wonderful place?

When nothing came to mind, I tried another tactic: If I was in love, what would I be doing right now at 8 a.m.?

-I'd be serving breakfast to the loved one.
-I'd make this breakfast from the very best I had, to be the best and most memorable breakfast in the world, all for love.
-I'd skimp on nothing nor would I care about calories, because my loved one is perfect as is and thinks I am perfect too. So I'd use real butter and the works and serve enough to fuel the loved one all morning long.
-I wouldn't care about the number of bowls, pans, dishes, paper towels, or anything.
-I'd go to great lengths, even trotting everything outside to the red picnic table a total of four round trips, to have breakfast in the ideal quintessential vividly green July morning, the grass perfectly mown so any chiggers would have to leap really high to bite me behind the knees.

With day-old French bread, plus eggs, milk, sugar and cinnamon, syrup and some (uncured, excellent, local) bacon I'd frozen and forgotten about, I fixed the imaginary loved one the best possible breakfast and served it in the shade beneath the twin oaks. Then I ate it, in the company of one bumblebee attracted by the fragrance of syrup. Oh yes, memorable. I ought to do this every day for a year.

Signs of Spring

The "secret pond" area below the cliffs, swampy at best, is LaBarque Creek floodplain, and the post-Christmas flood covered a great deal of it with sand, silt, and matted driftwood, and as I descended into my annual early-spring exploration of the area -- impassable because of mud in winter, and in summer and fall with the thorny shrubs, green and succulent, eager to rip your face off -- I didn't know whether to expect mud, water, drowned animals' bones, or what. I'd heard that the silt and sand might cover and suffocate this year's mushroom community. So I looked with hope for the Scarlet Cups (Sarcoscypha austriaca), always the first fungi of the year around here, at maximum about 5cm across. This is the only place on the property where this Sarcoscypha, with its white rickrack, grows. As usual the cups, although small, were hard to miss, fresh and vivid, growing on rotting fallen branches among last autumn's leaves. Spring is about a week early, but it couldn't come fast enough for us.

I had not spent a whole morning outside in months. I forgot what it was like to spend a  morning outside, and what a refreshment the air could be, and how pleasant the sun if I sat down and took it in, and the trees taller than I remembered. Hawks were calling; they're seeking mates right now. In the coming days I will get photos that will tell more of the post-flood story.

Good Morning

Because daytime heat mounts quickly now, I hike the woods and meadows in the early morning, thinking I'm alone and apart from society, like Thoreau, but the fact is that company is everywhere. I politely said "Good morning" to this young and beautiful Three-toed Box Turtle at the woods' edge. Young, I guessed, because of its moist shiny shell, clear markings, and the fact that it wasn't scared of me.

A Sunrise Like a Moonrise

Last night had a nightmare, very rare for me. This morning woke up in light of a glassy moonstone grey as I hadn't seen in a while, and suddenly my chemistry changed. From the kitchen, which faces east, I saw the sun struggling upward though shrouds of purple and gunmetal gray, looking more like a moonrise, and for a moment I was disoriented: day or night? No; it's summer becoming fall, heading toward the one equinox I could do without. No one hangs onto the final days of summer as I do, begging them, please do not take my basil and hummingbirds and "honor" vegetable stands. But the morning didn't listen and whisked me along as the earth shifts on its axis, tilts away from the sun, giving me no choice except acceptance. It does, however, provide coffee to lift one's spirits.

July Morning

With temperatures around 100 humid degrees at noon here in Missouri, the only time to go walking is before 7 a.m., when it's only about 80 degrees...down by where Doc Sargent Road intersects with F, right next to LaBarque Creek, it was all gold light this morning, with platinum mist and silver dew.

Frosty Morning

I'd dislike January if I didn't get divine gifts for my birthday, like this one: A frosty morning. I got a morning, imagine that. That's more than some have. One birthday I got a yellow-bellied sapsucker. Sometimes it IS all good.