June 17: Wild Iris

Getting their feet wet--

masses of blue irises,

bobolinks singing.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

June 25: Iris

Blue flag irises--

even more beautiful

near the singing wren.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

June 1: Lush

June arrives at last--
a wet green tent of leaves
and irises blooming.

June 15: Little Moose Island, Schoodic

Spent the morning on Schoodic Point in Acadia National Park. The tide was low, so we were able to walk over to Little Moose Island on an exposed natural causeway. I was with three botanists, so learned a lot about the plant life: the male Roseroot Sedum has yellow flowers and the female has red; what we call juniper "berries" are actually tiny cones; and Xanthoria lichens do not just grow where rodents have urinated...

Even sea-scoured
bare granite harbors flowers,
blooms of lichen.

Blue Flag & Xanthoria lichen

Bunchberry and gull feather

Cinquefoil? tucked in granite

Roseroot Sedum

Xanthoria lichen rings

Roseroot Sedum and Blue Flags

April 21: Out of state

We traveled way out of Maine today, all the way over the border to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Things are different down south. For one thing, check out the exotic-looking iris, above. There's nothing blooming like that back home yet. And the streets are lined with fragrant flowering trees, crabapples and cherries. It felt like summer here, with the cobbled sidewalks of historic downtown filled with tourists in flip flops and sundresses, street musicians on every corner. Even more exciting, they seem to value poetry here in a very public way. We noticed these Ambushed by Poetry signs all over town.

In the sunny shop

Bob Dylan's singing for us,

our weekend away.

 

June 5: Thunder

A real storm rolled through early this morning, the loud peals of thunder waking me and the cat several times (my husband sleeps through almost anything). At one point the lightning was flickering so frequently that I got up to make sure that a streetlight hadn't been struck. It was like a strobe light on the wet, pre-dawn streets of the neighborhood.

Thunder doesn't frighten me as it did when I was a child. I remember my father telling me when I was very young that even though the thunder sounds like it's booming right over the house, it's really far away. He explained how sounds travels more slowly than light, how if he rang a bell at the end of our street, I'd see the bell move before I heard it ring. For some reason it reassured me to know that there was some science behind the rumbling roars that startled me in the middle of the night. Maybe thinking about the bell just gave me something else to focus on.

Now when I'm awakened by a thunderstorm, I think of other things: how my husband was struck by lightning once and for years was terrified whenever a storm crashed overhead. Or how the sky gods were always the rulers in ancient pantheons, wielding their lightning bolts and thunder claps to keep humans and fellow deities in line. Or how we've really needed this rain after weeks of perfect, sunny weather, to renew the earth and maintain this lush green with its abundance of early blossoms that we've all been enjoying so much. We relish it because it's so strange to us here in Maine--the true spring that we always deserve after winter but never really get.

And now our first big thunderstorm ushers in summer, just two weeks away, with a bang.

Thunder beckoned forth
riverside iris, yellow
as summer sunlight.