my summer vacation: august in michigan

the tomatoes were ripening; in another week there will be quite a few. perhaps later in august it will be time to open the self-serve roadside stand. and plan lettuce and spinach for a fall crop.

there is a good-sized snapping turtle hanging out in the pond. my little camera can't do much to show it, but i am trying to learn to enlarge and crop. almost every morning there is a great blue heron on the pond and between the turtle and the heron the goldfish population is slightly reduced, as far as i can tell. but not enough to worry about.

jm and i have been riding our bikes around the neighborhood late in the afternoon and now that i am doing the natural area assessments, i look at fields in a different way.

this is a large field planted in soybeans on six mile down near earhart road. it's good to keep land in cultivation, otherwise the invasives move in. i will resist going on and on about canada thistle, autumn olive, reed canary grass, purple loosestrife, etc. my question is: when one invasive meets another, who will win out? i am keeping an eye on a swamp nearby where reed canary grass is competing with cattails (yes, some cattails are native, but there is an alien kind taking over).


we took ellie swimming in the mighty huron. there were some ducks around, and for fear that she might take off after them, we kept her on the leash for a while. this was at hudson mills metro park, one of the several attractive and interesting parks nearby.



penny invited me to go to the beach on lake michigan with her large, entertaining family. they'd rented a very large house for a week, so there was room for all. she assured me that if i came, i wouldn't have to be "nice, enthusiastic, or cooperative." that's an excellent sort of invitation. and who wouldn't have fun with penny?


and, for some intellectual content, there was jerry on the beach, reading "After Capitalism." i never found out what the book was proposing. i didn't ask. but i do wonder, slightly.


we spent a lot of time on the beach at south haven. the first couple of days there was a stiff wind out of the west, creating some waves to play in. this clan likes to go out and do things. i admire that. penny, meghan and i went kayaking (no photos, worried about the camera getting wet); the others went out in a speedboat for tubing and accompanied by a dinghy; there were lots of bikes and horseback riding and paintball were being proposed. i was interested in both of these, but when i heard that being shot with a paintball actually hurts, i could forego that.


here's corbie, riding shotgun in the speedboat on the day before his 11th birthday. katie was at the wheel. the "teenagers" would be tubing, but they were hardly teenagers at all, having at least graduated from high school.


we took this photo so that their parents would have something to see of their last happy hours, in case they all drowned in lake michigan.

corbett and patrick took off in the dinghy, following the speedboat, headed for open water. penny and i were stationed on the beach, ready to rescue anyone who needed rescuing, or who wanted to get out of hours of sun in the speedboat, as corbie did. two ladies in hats got to the dinghy before penny and i did, and they helped corbie get out. they had brought two little boys to the beach for the day. corbett was happy to give the boys a ride in the dinghy, perhaps more fun than their inflatable raft. the lake was calm that day.


and finally, on a different note,



this church, or ex-church, was a block from the rental house. alas, it is in very poor condition, which seems a shame as it has many interesting architectural details: the tower over the entrance, the little colonnade on the tower, the pattern of shingles on the roof, the round window with a flat bottom, some simple rectangular stained glass windows. i wonder what style this is? any ideas, you architecture mavens who read the blog? (i know, ms is out of the country now, but she'll be back).

as you can see, my summer vacation has been very interesting, as penny would say, and a whole lot of fun. penny told me when i left that i had been too nice, but it wasn't hard at all.

circumpolar

warning: this is another wildflower post, but only in part.

exactly a month ago today, our swedish friend ingrid treated jm and me to an excursion to a forest preserve outside eskilstuna. we rode our bikes until the path became too narrow, hilly, rocky, rooty, mossy, dark, and full of holes where trolls lurk (trolls don't like to come out in sunshine, so we didn't see any, nor did we see any other human beings).



we walked to a small lake, where ingrid spread out the typical and delicious picnic lunch of västerbotten cheese pie and some pickled herring and beer. i tried to ignore the water snake(s?) that was tacking back and forth between the reeds and waterlilies. we relaxed and indulged in some long-winded storytelling about people on our minds.


at several places in little openings in the forest were modest groups of small pink twin flowers (Linea borealis). these modest little blossoms are the one plant that the great botanist Carolus Linaeus chose to name for himself. he might have said that this plant was like himself: "lowly, insignificant, disregarded, and flowering for but a brief time..." (no citation for this given; is this an example of the Swedish dictum not to boast?)

there were several stands of them, so we picked one. the flowers have a very sweet, delicate smell.



the same twin flowers show up in my "wildflowers of michigan" book, as an indicator species of ancient woodlands. i've never seen them here--i suppose they must be further north. they are described as 'native.' this seemed puzzling until i found a reference online that called them 'circumpolar.' very good. i like the concept and the term itself.

but then, how many other things on earth are circumpolar, i wonder? evergreen trees, i imagine. seals? bears? deer? lichen? mosses? and much more. did the sami people from the polar regions of europe have contact across the ice with the inuit?

on our way back, we rode past a farm with dairy cows grazing in a field some distance from the road. knowing that ingrid is an expert in an archaic form of traditional cow calling, we encouraged her to give it a try. amazingly, the entire herd immediately came galloping towards us, about as fast as cows can run.

these were the cleanest cows i have ever seen, but then, they were Swedish cows.

as you can see, we enjoyed a perfectly beautiful summer day.

wildflower of the week

after feeling so discouraged about all the invasive species taking over the natural world, my spirits were lifted when i saw this stand of native wild lilies, called variously 'turk's cap lilies, Lilium superbum,' or 'michigan lilies, Lilium michiganese.' these are on the north side of earhart road, south of seven mile. the exotic red-orange flowers blaze through the surrounding greenery.

dangerous alien invader

this is a plant called wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) that has recently started to show up along the roadsides and in other areas in michigan, our garden for instance. it has attractive yellow flowers growing as high as four feet tall, and resembles other carrot family umbrellifera, like queen anne's lace.

but this is a dangerous plant, as its sap is highly toxic, containing chemicals (furocoumarins) that will burn and blister the skin when exposed to the ultraviolet rays of sunlight. (google it if you want to see some nasty second-degree burns on several websites). if you find it on your property, check various websites for how to eliminate it.


this is a stand of wild parsnip along six mile road, near earhart. judging from the bikes and toys in the driveways, it's likely that children either live or play in the houses nearby. i wonder if the adults know about the dangers of this plant? we expect everyone to be familiar with poison ivy, but this is possibly even more dangerous, and the flowers are attractive. once established, it spread rapidly.

should i tell the families what i know about this scary but pretty plant?

on the subject of alien invasive plants (those that have the potential to take over and dominate an area), it seems that before long the entire state of michigan and much else will be completely covered with garlic mustard, canada thistle, autumn olive, purple loosestrife, reed canary grass, wild parsnip, buckthorn, and various others too numerous to mention. it's downright depressing to see stands of wild parsnip all along pontiac trail now.

postcard from the british museum

to: CP and SS
june 29, 09


thinking of you when i saw this line-up of greek philosophers in the british museum.they represent, from left to right: socrates, antisthenes (a cynic), chrysippos (a stoic), and epicurus. these are all roman copies of greek originals, and it is impossible to know if they resemble their subjects at all. two of these portraits were found in the library of a roman villa on the via appia (i forgot to note which two), dating from the late second or first century bce.

what better evidence of the continuity of western culture: scholars and students still reading their texts and debating their relevance now more than 2,000 years later. will the academics of another 2000 years from now still be thinking about these guys, and will they be hanging photographs of sartre and simone de beauvoir in their libraries? will there indeed be any academics in the year 4,000? or even anyone left of our species? who can imagine it?

as our friend pk says, 'isn't it all interesting?'

warm regards, as always, j

postcard from salisbury

to: ms in a large metropolitan area
15 june 09

today we went to salisbury cathedral. it was completely built in 30 some years, from 1220 to 1258. in one book i looked at on english gothic architecture, it stated that the architecture of the cathedral may be too perfect, giving it a cold, impersonal feeling. do you think a building be too perfect? (or is 'too perfect' an oxymoron?)

and what about that modern baptismal font? could fonts be fountains? probably not. but why not?

thinking of you and art, love, j

postcard from london

to: anw and jhw
29 june 09

today at the british museum, still one of my favorites, i saw these items for sale in their shop. the text goes on about how grazia is one of the great ancient deruta ceramics centers of italy. and the pattern is ever so elegant and traditional. and if you'd like to buy a cup and saucer you'll be putting 110 pounds (about $160) on your credit card. so now you know not to put the deruta in the yard sale.

love, your mom