Sherry Chandler

Signs of Fall

The dogwood berries are starting to form and turn.

Last year because of a freeze, the old dogwood outside our bedroom window did not make berries at all, so I’m pleased to see these.

A late afternoon rain has dulled the evening and cooled us off a bit, given the photo a bit of drama. I hope you can see the rain drops on the leaves.

Orb in the morning

I wonder sometimes about the age-old question
of the tree in the forest, the prisming orb
in the morning sun. Only chance
that I should see it out the window
as I slid a slice of bread into the toaster.
And yet, somehow, this chance seeing,
this random delight, seems my highest purpose.

The cost of misplaced sentimentality

Here is the hornworm my husband found on our tomatoes on June 27. As far as I know, the Mother Jones flyer has no significance, except to be a backdrop for the little green thing.

Photo by TR Williams. Hand by TR Williams

Hubby found the little caterpillar so “cute” that he didn’t want to kill it. So he moved it over onto a little patch of volunteer tomatoes.

Well, the ungrateful thing didn’t stay in its ghetto. It (to mix metaphors) came back across the border and it brought its cousins and brothers with it. Now they have fattened on our garden economy, our tomato patch is in recession, and the worms look like this.

Photo by TR Williams. Hand by TC Williams

Silly sidenote: Hubby brought these monsters in the house to show them to me while I was lying on the bed reading Virginia’s Western War, which was fought in Kentucky. When one of them rolled off his hand onto my belly, I considered renewing hostilities.

Since there is practically nothing that these critters eat that isn’t a thing that we want to eat ourselves, we have now called in the National Guard in the form of a bucket of soapy water.

We could keep them for pets, I guess, and raise them on wheat germ.

And lest anybody take me very seriously, I’d like to say that I rather favor an open border with Mexico and an amnesty policy for illegals. They are not fattening off our economy at our expense. They are, in fact, contributing and we are exploiting.

These are tobacco hornworms, with which those of us who grew up on tobacco farms before the days of heavy pesticide use remember having to pick off the crop by hand. You can tell it’s a tobacco worm because the side stripe is straight. Tomato hornworms have a v-shaped stripe. According to Wikipedia, Manduca sexta, the tobacco worm, has mechanisms for selectively sequestering and secreting the neurotoxin nicotine present in tobacco.

It grows up to be a hawkmoth with a wingspan of about 100 mm or about 4 inches. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. I think I would have remembered.

Mythical cats and cats in their cups

Photo by TR Williams

. . . he lay awake for a while with the cat lying on his duvet, purring like a mobile generator. He always thought a feline in the bedroom was appropriate, in a way. A cat was the Celtic equivalent to the dog Cerberus—the guardian at the entrance to the Underworld. Randy could watch over him as he slipped across the vulnerable threshold between waking and sleeping.

—Stephen Booth, Scared to Live (Bantam, 2008)

The moon in June

Photo by TR Williams, June 4, 2010

Mid-May at our house is

nicely focussed turnips

(and a blade of grass, but what the heck!)

slightly out of focus moths

and an equally out of focus indigo bunting (it was a dull day and a moving target)

And of course the primary election, which is possibly in worse focus than these photos. Salon has Rand Paul not just winning Kentucky’s Senatorial election but also a prime candidate for the 2010 presidential run. Well, there’s not much I can do about that, one way or the other, being registered as a Democrat. But I do intend to cast my vote. And I urge all my fellow Kentuckians to do the same. Our choices aren’t inspiring but it’s what we got.

We read

We had a wonderful time last night at Alan MacKellar’s 25 Year Retrospective photography exhibit and poetry reading at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning.

Thanks to everyone who came out. You were a wonderful audience.

Those who weren’t at our reading I hope were either at the Morris Book Shop listening to Maurice Manning read from The Common Man or on their way to the Southern Kentucky Bookfest.

And thanks to TR for taking copious photographs. I thought it might be fun to share a few.

TR, who is a veteran, says this was one of the better readings he’s been to, with 4 strong featured readers and a strong set of open mic readers. I have some photos of those folk too that I’ve put up here on Flickr.

First,the star, Alan MacKellar reading from his first collection of poetry, Chasing Shroedinger’s Cat.

And then the supporting players:

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer:

Jan Isenhour:

and me, myself, and I: