The Miracle of It All, Rabbits, and the Small-flowered Woolly Bean (Strophostyles leiosperma)

Small-flowered Woolly Bean (Strophostyles leiosperma)

The flowers on this legume are small--but beautiful.

This photo is courtesy of my dear husband, who indulges my evolving interests by getting me everything that
I could think to ask for . . . usually before I ask.

I love the shape of these compound leaves.  I have come to depend upon leaf shapes
more and more for identification.  Blossoms are usually what catches me eye, but leaf
details are always there.  Dependable.  I like that.

The afternoon is quiet today.  The rabbits aren't even bumping about in their enclosure.  

I was going describe where the buns live as a "cage," but that seems like such a cruel word.  They are dwarf bunnies, and they each started out with their own 32" X 32" enclosures.  There were four of them then.  

(My The Peter Journals blog is named after the first miniature rabbit who acquired me.)  

Now, though, there are only two rabbits left alive.


To the left is a photo of Roo right before I took her to be put to sleep.  She succumbed to a parasite infection in her brain--and lost control of her muscles.

Now Oops and Murphy remain.  Two of the original enclosures have been combined into a single 64" X 32" living space that occupies one wall of the family/TV room.  Oops and Murphy are accustomed to the air conditioning and get baths if I am thoughtless enough to offer treats that cause . . . ah . . . messy potty-going.  

The fact that it is enclosed obviously restricts their movements while they are inside--but in with them are toys that make noise--that they can throw around.  Some toys are attached to the walls or sides and they can be swung or knocked about.  There are things to chew with different textures and tastes--and two large, deep potty boxes layered with pine pellets and then aspen shavings.  Their boxes are changed every day and sometimes topped off with fresh timothy hay. 

So as far as I can tell, they should be happy and comfortable--but of course they leap from their home almost as soon as I open the door for their evening constitutional. 

Tonight I have given them run of the kitchen as well as the TV room . . . and Nathan just pointed out that they have both snuggled down behind me on the bottom floor of the cats' 4 story tower.  

With two huge rooms to explore and in which  to run, they have converged to cluster together, sharing the same 12" square of space.  

I see myself in these two rabbits.  

With the whole world to explore every day, with every possible physical necessity and comfort provided for me, with safety and love granted me at every turn--I do not stretch my mind or my body with the magnitude of time and resources I hold--but spend the afternoon reading or napping or thinking and writing about my thoughts.  

I keep myself inside myself--squirreled away inside my comfortable, "12 inch square" of space.

I would like to see the rabbits running and leaping; expressing joy and finding new places to explore--smelling new smells, seeing new colours, hearing new sounds.  But they do not.

When Brent gets home at night, I would like to have him look around our home--or look into my eyes--and see that something wonderful happened while he was gone.  

Today, though, Brent got home and I was asleep on the porch--on the swing that Nathan helped me assemble so that I could read scriptures in the afternoons this next year.

Brent found me asleep.  He woke me up and noticed that there were extra parts.  He looked at the swing and put the last two screws into the swing supports.  Then we went shopping for food to take with us on our fossil hunting trip tomorrow.

There was nothing that I had finished today.  There were no wild flights of fancy or duties fulfilled.  

But Brent came home anyway--and when he got here he stayed.  

I think, for me, that is the fancy, the duty--the magic and miracle of it all.

The flowers that actually become the bananas.

Inspiration and a Push

This Wednesday and the Wednesday before that, I took lessons from John Lopinot--professional photographer--and dad of the young woman who makes my one acre look like  million bucks.  The reality of his coming--like a deadline in a college class--made me dig back through the boat-load of photographs I've taken over the last seven years. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found.

Nathan spotted these ducklings near the edge of the lake.  I love the spikes of green, the ripples coming away from them as they move--and the focus of light on the lead duckling.

This was one of my first photos of the barn my sister managed in Minnesota.  If I were a painter, I would have painted a sky like this, the diagonals of grass cut lines with the road, and the red square above the round steel bin.

I was visiting my daughter and her family near D.C. and we went to the Smithsonian.  I caught her as she walked from the window and across the hall through the frame of a modern sculpture.  This is such a good portrait of her--she is an artist herself, utterly unconcerned with fashion trends. When we were planning her wedding, she wanted to wear white overalls . . .

Were I to prep this for a print, I would crop off the left, emptier side where the scissors are.  I like the movement of the burnished kitchen faucet handle, meeting the line of the leaves at a 90 degree angle--leading the eye from the top rose to spiral around under the two red roses--and then back to the center rose, tipped with red from the low lighting and long exposure.

This is technically not a good photograph.  I am shooting from dark to dark, lit behind by bright sunlight.  The details of the cranes' eyes, beaks and feathers are difficult to make out.  I do like the story of the picture, though--male watches over the pregnant female while she rests during the heat of the day.

I know that many people do not like squirrels.  My own husband has a violent dislike for them ever since they tried to eat the wood shingle roof of our Kansas City, MO home.  Unfortunately for him, I quite like them--they are quick and curious and will come close to me if they trust . . . and I have raw peanuts to offer.  For this shot, I laid down on the sidewalk in front of the subject.  It was late afternoon and the shadows in the photograph make it one of my favorites.

For some reason I cannot fathom, this wild marsh rabbit (native to Florida) came to live in our yard one summer and would sit still and watch me as I sat still and photographed him.  I have miniature rabbits in the house as pets--they are sweet, but not the same as this wild gift of tolerance.

Mushrooms pop up all over our yard--it is wet here and the wind blows in some pretty amazing fungi.  This group reminded me of standing in line--everyone crushing forward to find out what they were standing in line to see.