Fragments From Floyd

Alright then: This is CJ. She is almost 12 years old. She wandered up to the Emergency Room door at CJ Harris Hospital in Sylva, NC, where I had my first incarnation as a physical therapist. She came home with me in a box, and has allowed us to share her premises with her now for all these years. Lucky us.

She wants me to state that she resents being relegated to the outside, while Mr. HighHorse the Dog gets to lounge around inside. CJ makes no pretense of caring one bit for that lady they call Ann, who makes snide remarks about how there are 100 things to do with a dead cat, and how she just knows that 'the cat is going to outlive me, just for spite'.

You know the difference in temperment between cats and dogs?

A dog, seeing how his humans care for him and love him, says "See how they care for me?! How like gods they are to me".

To try this at home, the man might strip naked and use his feet to grip the woman, also naked, by her neck so that they form a long chain of nakedness. Vertically, he would be standing on her shoulders. She would then curl up to copulate with him (while he continues to hold her head by his feet) and then uncurl into the original position.

Now comes the tricky part. He grasps a tree branch growing above a natural body of water and hangs there with her suspended by her neck from his feet. The two would then swing as one (like tandem gymnasts on a bar) while her abdomen slaps repeatedly into the mud.

Maybe I had stood up too fast. I felt more than heard a rushing noise, so low frequency it seems to be coming from inside me, a visceral sensation somewhat familiar to me. It's not my heart racing, as I first suspected. This kind of thing happens in the spring, when the ruffed grouse are drumming: you feel the thudding of that mating display in your guts more than hear it through your ears; and more than once, I thought I was having tachycardia.

I felt this inside. It was a whirring, rushing sound; sounds, plural, like helicopter rotors, very soft ones, hundreds of them, and it reached consciousness that it was happening overhead. I looked up not knowing if the something was going up, or coming down on top of me. Boat-tail grackles, at least a hundred of them, had roosted for the night, and I must have startled them when I stood up. Startled me, too. But after putting the sound into context, I was able to appreciate that this was one of my cherished 'signs of Fall'...the blackbirds of Goose Creek becoming restless, congregating around their migratory maps, bickering about the best route and the best timing, and of course, who would lead and who would follow. Grackles and starlings, I am not unhappy to see them go.

Starlings, grackles, crows, ravens, buzzards: the black birds of Goose Creek, from smallest to largest. My personal favorite is, without question, the raven. Most ravens pass through our area over a month or two in the spring, and again in the Fall. A dozen or so hang around for the winter here and I love to see them soar and glide, with their distinctive fan-shaped tails. Despite their urban garbage-seeking behaviors in some places, in these parts, they are very reclusive and wary birds. More than once, I have watched as one approached from the far ridge, heading so as to pass overhead. From a quarter mile, I can tell it has just spotted me standing down there, a bare speck, as he wheels 90 degrees to make a wide circle around me before resuming his intended path. When I am in the woods, they pass overhead not seeing me, close enough that I can hear the hard-feathered stroke of their wings.

There is a nobility and intelligence about ravens that earns my respect. I was very near one only once, when out driving around the back roads with an older neighbor. We found it on the side of the road, injured, and brought it home to nurse back to health. My first impression was the amazing size of the thing...standing about 24 inches tall, with a heavy 4" beak and a regal bearing. This one looked me straight in the eye with intent, unlike anything I have ever known from a lesser creature than a dog. That was my only close encounter with ravens until one fogbound freezing winter day a few years back.

A dozen or more had flocked in a dense stand of mature trees not 100 feet from our cabin. This was not their usual rookery, but the fog probably made them bed down early and right where they found themselves late one afternoon, when the fog settled in so thick that you could barely see your hand at the end of your arm. I read in a National Geographic later that more than 50 raven calls, or vocalizations had been identified; not random squawks but meaningful messages indicating mood or purpose. Like many birds, ravens make different sounds from a roost than when single or in pairs, and marauding for food. That winter afternoon, I heard so many and varied and bizarre sounds from that accidental rookery...I won't even attempt to describe this...that I will never see or hear a raven again without remembering that incredible day.

When our ravens pass over the valley here, we hear only two calls. One is a hoarse rasping "RAUWK". I have a theory that the other name for the raven, "ROOK", is onomatopoeia, imitating this sound; I haven't been able to confirm that, so I preach it as gospel. The second call is my favorite, and I associate it with the pleasure of flight. It has been called their "TONK" call, described as a "metallic thunk". To me, it is more fluid, like a smooth pebble dropped down a deep well. I watched a raven last fall flying high over the pasture. Every little bit, it would make the 'water sound', then fold its wings and plummet like a stone, rise high and then repeat it. Pardon my anthropomorphic interpretation, but that call was saying "Life is good. Wings are wonderful. Watch this!"

The crows are good for mobbing hawks and owls. You can often see a dark shape silhouetted against the sky up on the ridge, sitting there in disgust while 40 crows swoop and caw, passing in rapid arcs down in front of the raptor, purely out of a stong need to harrass. They do the same thing in flight, and seeing a redtailed hawk wheel over so its talons face the approaching crow is always worth craning your neck to see.

I don't quite understand how I can be in a writing slump, what with all the excitement around here this week. (Not!) As you regular readers know, I am presently a house husband, 15 miles from town, a mile from our nearest neighbor (who wishes she was 15 miles from her nearest neighbor)...just me and the dog here most days. You'd wonder I find anything to fill the pages of Fragments at all, much less multiple entries most days. Not a lot happens here in a typical day, but there are the occasional 'events'.

This week, I could have written about our getting a new refrigerator... an episode not without its comedy. But then, the humor would mostly be at the expense of the wife, who insisted that we must thoroughly clean the entire house because 'we don't want those movers to think we live like pigs'. Yes, Ann: large hairy stevadors from West Virginia are known for their White-Glove inspections and high standards of cleanliness in the homes they visit in the delivery of large appliances. On the other hand, she might have had a point.

I was glad she was not the one to see what lurked under the old refrigerator when I moved it out of the way for the new one. Even though I pride myself on my taxonomic skills generally, I could not even identify the organic matter under our refrigerator to KINGDOM. Taking a stab at it: mycological, Kingdom Fungi. I wondered, perhaps, if the large gray wooly mass could be harvested and processed, converted perhaps to a source of nutrition, like Quorn...the meatlike substance made from mold that has been enjoyed in Europe for years, now available (and right there in front of me in the dustpan) in the United States. Nah. I won't write about that.

We are in that in-between season, neither fish nor fowl, with summer dying and autumn not yet born. I am sure when the cool weather comes in earnest, this heat-induced lethargy will fall away, the drought-dust will settle when the hurricane bands spread some real rains up our way. The writing juices will drip, then trickle and flow, and I will look back and remember the brief spell when the words wouldn't come.

In the blog-introspection department: Fragments seems to have reached some sort of steady state, for the time being. There are enough visitors to keep it from echoing like an empty house. More visitors are coming from bookmarks, fewer from referrer's pages. Numbers are up a bit, visit length and page views falling. The average visit is now 2 minutes 5 seconds and headed downward. The comments ratio is about 1 comment per 30 visitors and email about the same. Geobutton has been a valuable tool now, after my first two weeks of use, with guests from Kuala Lampur, Singapore, Belarus, and many other places ...I am relearning my geography by looking up each new country that signs the guest book. I get more visits from the Northwest than the South in the US, which surprises me. Thanks to those who have read the longer pieces and seem to enjoy them. Non gustibus disputandum, don't ya reckon?

Bear with me in the POSSIBLE but not-yet certain and certainly not completed process of moving Fragments to a Moveable Type location. I am going to try importing the blogspot template into a "test" MT blog this weekend, when I am here alone. If I scream, weep, wimper or drool, just pat me on the head, pretend to be sympathetic to me, and especially be nice to Ann during this time of crisis. You know, I think she sort of breathes a sigh of relief as she drives off to work each morning, knowing she doesn't have to listen to me shriek like a banshee when Blogger goes down, or the computer crashes and I lose my award-winning story on the sex-lives of the mushrooms. Dang, that one woulda been a prize winner.

Buffalo Mountain has quite a history. Less than a lifetime ago, it was a cultural holdout, a relict community of lawless Appalachian moonshiners who mistrusted everyone and lived a primative exisitence in self-imposed isolation. It is said that one man moved this mountain. He did it by acting on a call to minister to the spiritual needs of a hardscrabble community that did not readily accept his help. He eventually won them over, and they in turn helped him construct six fieldstone churches that dot the countryside today. Bob Childress is remembered fondly by the oldest generation of Floyd County residents as the man who brought churches, roads, bridges and schools to the Buffalo.

Today, the Virginia Natural Heritage program protects 1000 acres of the mountain. "Widely recognized as one of Virginia's greatest natural heritage treasures, Buffalo Mountain Natural Area Preserve is like no other place in the state. A variety of unusual conditions combine to make the preserve home to 14 plant species, three invertebrate species and six natural communities that are rare in Virginia."

Well a week ago last Tuesday, I came home from my job.
I went out to the back porch and fed my old dog Bob.
I walked out in the back yard, out behind the garden shed
And what I saw there nearly made me drop dead.

Now friends won't you listen to this lesson that I teach.
All that you sew you will someday have to reap.
But there's still one thing I wonder, oh my Lord, oh my gosh!
What made me think I'd need twenty hills of squash.

Words and music
Copyright L Dennis Stamper

Yesterday, I had a debate with Ann in the choice of paying $3.00 or $10.00 for some hardware store item.

"The $10 one is built a whole lot better. I know it's more expensive, but I would rather pay $10 and get something that will last a lifetime", I argued.

She replied, "You are forgetting how old we are. Three dollars might be all you need to spend for a lifetime's worth of use".

When your loved one (including pets, of course, provided they are large enough to contain adequate carbon; Chihuahuas need not apply) breathes their last breath, be sure that the Long Black StationWagon is destined for a Life Gem Certified Mortuary, to assure the highest quality product from their earthly remains.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen. You can have old Uncle Mort specially processed, his carbon extracted, compacted, polished and precision-cut, and wear him on your pinkie as a LifeGem. In fact, you may reap over 100 certified, high quality LifeGems from the old curmudgeon as memorials for each family member, the guys down at the lodge, and the mail man, with a few left over as party favors.

It asks "Do you mean Fishing?" Dictionary.com tells me there were a couple of folks with the last name FISK, but I cannot make their histories into an everyday term.

Is it a nice-i-fied version of the F-word? An inside joke among a certain small circle of bloggers who I just happen to run across, over and over again? There is a Fisk University, all black, I think. Is fisking a racial slur of some sort? Maybe a jabberwockish nonsense word?

There may be a flooding ocean of words, but only those from my weblog are mine. To a small group of 'friends' those words matter. Is that any different than in the flesh and bones world...a few who know of my existance and care, and the dark matter masses of the rest of the world for whom I am 1 in 6.2 billion fellow creatures?

Once again, I let my fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages, and got a bite from the University Medical Center. Some place called the Department of Comparative Medicine. Whatever. I took the job as research technician and would be working with several Veterinarian PhD's on various projects that used animal models for human disease. Kewl!

What it actually meant was that, faithful to the footsteps of those who had preceded me in my chosen field of Vertebrate Zoology, my Masters Degree qualified me to handle various kinds of animal poop while knowing the Latin name for the animal producing the deposit. Also the higher degree somehow instilled a willingness to tolerate inordinately high levels of inhaled ammonia, a by-product the breakdown of stale urine. Got to where is sorta smelled good...a true sign that I had 'made it' as a zoologist. Like the folks who live near and work at papermills say of that awful stench: Smells like money to me!. And all those nay-sayers who told me all I could do with a Masters in Zoology was shovel poop behind the elephants at the zoo were dead wrong! Much smaller poop. No heavy lifting!

My chief responsibility would be with a study of trace element effects on dental caries ('cavities') prevention. Rat mommas were fed various low to high sugar diets while nursing new litters of rat pups. New born rat pups are bright pink, half the size of your thumb, and look like writhing little plugs of old-fashioned pink bubble gum. The rat pups received various trace minerals by intubation (now that is another story) to see what effect boron, strontium and so on might have on tooth developement.

So, I mixed diets, cleaned cages, formulated and administered treatment doses, and generally tried to keep all the rat mommas and babies happy and properly fed or dosed toward the objective of the study, which was to determine how the trace minerals had impacted tooth developement while nursing on a high sugar diet of momma's milk. And so, when the rat pups were 40 days old, tooth development had reached the desired degree of maturity.

Oops. I guess I hadn't really thought about the next step. Somehow, little rat chums, we sort of need your teeth for assay, if you don't mind. Now baby rats are cute in the way that all mammal-babies are: big-eyed, trusting, playful and innocent. I have to confess, after handling each of these little white-furry critters many times each day since birth, I was not comfortable during my instruction on the use of the Murine Cephalic Clevage Device. Yep, that's right: a guillotine. I will spare you the details.

So, now I have 120 tiny rat heads, with the teeth we need to extract for the P-32 study. That requires extracting the tiny little rat molar teeth. Extraction requires heating. So, I put 120 little foil-wrapped rat heads in the autoclave, a glorified pressure cooker, for 30 minutes. Opening that autoclave when the task was done is the one thing that stands out in my mind of the 14 months I worked at this job.

I opened the autoclave slowly, to let the pressure escape gradually, and out pours a cloud of rat-head-scented steam filling the room...a vapor of all my little chums I had nurtured for 40 days, until I became their executioner. Was it too late to consider a career change, I wondered? Not a good day, folks. I was never so relieved when the job came to a stopping place and I could go home where there were no rats...heads, teeth or otherwise. I began the 2 mile walk home, trying to think about anything other than the details of my day.

Ah, finally, our apartment door appears. Ann has been home today and I am looking forward to a home-cooked meal. I will never forget opening the door and being overcome by the smell of hot, cooked meat. Ham, if I recall. It was overpowering, too much like the rat head stew I had just left; I almost chucked my cookies. I apologized from outside the door and without explaining other than to say "I'm sorry. We have to eat out tonight. Don't ask. I will tell you about it. Some day. Maybe. Let's go get a salad".

So, I had my job. I was bringing home $7000 a year. Plenty. Soon after the rat head episode, our first child was born, and we knew we were destined to leave Birmingham for a place to the north, rural and beautiful, but without a clue as how to go about finding this place we dreamed of. Reading maps and Mother Earth News were fine for dreaming, but we were too conventional to just buy a VW bus and start driving, like many were doing in those days. We had to have a plan, a destination, and jobs would be nice.

What we do have here is gnats. (The one pictured here has a pin through it...that's the best kind of gnat). Gnats prefer running water for their life cycle. It takes very little running water, and that is exactly how much we have had during this parched summer. Just enough moisture for an outstanding great crop of gnats. Gnats don't sting or bite. They don't carry disease. They were born merely to aggravate, and they fill that particular niche quite well.

They are weak flyers, rising and falling with the air currents. I can see them out there in the morning sun, waiting patiently for me to come out to garden every morning. With an uncanny knack for knowing when both of your hands are occupied, wet or covered with garden dirt or bean dust, these marvelously obnoxious micro-demons find exactly THAT opportunity to do their work, and their workday has begun.

Goose Creek gnats have obviously been trained from birth to know the episode of Star Wars where the TIE Fighters find and enter the tiny opening of the Death Star. Fighter-gnats innately know how to make their way into their favorite orifice: the human ear. Their two-part buzz is perhaps their most aggravating feature, and they are fond of performing it from deep inside the Death Star...just far enough into the ear that a muddy finger-thrust only chases them down into the deadly Earwax Zone. Those that are assigned to battle stations outside the ear walk expertly with their tiny-tickly track shoes in such a way as to create an excruciating itch, especially, as mentioned, when hands and fingers are covered in bean dust or other gardening gradoo.

Three years ago, we were working on the old house here, having the metal roof painted silver, like most of the older homes in Floyd County. It was about this time of year, as a matter of fact. The painting took a couple of days, and it really looked great, especially compared to the faded green it had been when we first saw it. I walked out to admire it one late August morning. Instead of shiny silver, the roof was dull matt gray, almost black! And fuzzy-looking, like it was covered in suede! At first I blamed the painter...a Baptist minister and part-time roof painter. I swear, you can't trust anybody to do things the right way these days!

I pulled out the extension ladder and crawled up to inspect the bizarre thing that had become of our expensive paint job. What I discovered was that the roof was coated in a thick blanket of gnats! At night when the metal cools, condensation forms. When gnat babies hatch from the creek over a 2-3 day period, they do so in untold millions. At least one of those millions ended up stuck to the wet roof, unable to unstick themselves before the sun came up and baked them in place. Even a heavy rain did little to unstick gnat corpses from the roof. I had to climb up the extension ladder and wash them off with the hose sprayer... so many that they filled up the gutters, and I had to literally scoop the gnat-cadavers out into a five-gallon bucket with a garden trowel.

To hang out with a friend's friends, to travel among my former neighborhoods and the ghosts of past lives, to compare and contrast all of this against where I live and who I am now is a bit like standing the kids up against the kitchen wall to see how much they have grown since some former time, marked in pencil on the door jamb.

So, on Friday, we traveled some beautiful miles to Boone, North Carolina, to attend a performance by "Dennis Stamper and Friends". Dennis and family are True Friends. He and I have known each other through some wonderful and terrible times. Music is one thing that brought us together. When he found out we were coming this weekend, he requested that Nathan be among his performing "friends" (the 'regulars' are a multi-instrumented beer-making forensic toxicologist and a spritely deep-fried southern-drawling lady lawyer).

So, Friday evening, at Dennis' request, and after forgetting his lyrics twice and making an amazingly graceful recovery, Nathan sang one of our favorite songs of the many he has written. I thought it might be worthwhile to share the lyrics with you.

I have a young MT blog up and running, with some repeats from Fragments/blogger and some stuff only posted there. Soon I will be attempting to import my Fragments/blogger template into Moveable Type. Any words from the wise among you who have made this transition? I am open for any suggestions or warnings you might offer.

It has been a crazy week. For those who expressed their concerns after all the 'cloud poodle' stuff this week, I am back on my medications (wink). Here are a few odds and ends from places I have been lately.

[...] I miss that stuff. I miss seeing the ice cream man as a huge treat rather than a huge burden on my wallet. I miss seeing the pool as an escape from the heat rather than a danger to every small child in the yard. I miss the yells of "tag, you're it!" and the days we would spend on our bicycles making lefts and rights and rights and lefts, trying hard to see if we could get lost in our own neighborhood [...]

[...] I left the sandals at the very edge of the water and waded in. It was shaded by trees and overgrown shrubs and was just slightly cool. I can hardly remember the last time I was in the water before today. Timidly, I swam out a short distance, into the sun. I couldn’t see the bottom—only the tall, hairy weeds that neared the surface. So I didn’t know how quickly the water would get deep. When I couldn’t touch bottom, I swam back and started over. Once I got used to the weeds touching me, they didn’t bother me [...]

[...] Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. … the past clarifies potential paths to the future. One often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the "crash" that many fear -- a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the "soft landing" that many people hope for - a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology. -– Joseph A. Tainter

[...] Citing teachings dating back to the Second Vatican Council, and statements by Pope John Paul II throughout his papacy, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops declared unequivocally that the biblical covenant between Jews and God is valid and therefore Jews do not need to be saved through faith in Jesus.[...]

Most any time I twist at the trunk while leaning, (as in hoeing in the garden this morning...bad body mechanics! you ought to know better!) or use my arms in an awkward posture (like today, sitting side-saddle on a step, reaching up to use the sander on the riser two steps higher, until all the steps were sanded), I get a ropy, knotty, painful trigger point in a muscle. This one tonight is under my shoulder blade. Some of you probably get the same results from too much hunkering behind the computer screen. Faulty posture is a frequent cause for myofascial pain.

The reason I mention this is to tell you about a neat tool that helps inactivate active muscle trigger points, the point-tender sore places that almost everybody experiences. It is so simple and I can't say how many times I have given myself a good dope-slap for not inventing this thing myself.

It is called a TheraCane. Basically, it just provides a way to administer deep pressure to a trigger point. This compression can inactive the point and keep the pain condition from escalating. Many trigger points are in the upper and lower back. The curved cane lets you reach those spots and apply firm pressure to the painful areas. It is very effective, not expensive, unbreakable and safe to use.

It is time to plant fall greens...kale, collards, turnip and mustard greens. But hoeing a row just made a dust devil that chased me around for a while, as I walked about, reading the tombstones of one vegetable, then the next. The remaining water in buckets and barrels, filled from the last of the creek water from the deep hole near the barn, I poured around the Buttercrunch that should be transplanted soon, but why bother. Today, the last of the isolated pools in the creek dried up, and the shiners and darters, the beautiful Northern Red Bellied Dace...all are lifeless pale flotsam on a grave of mud.

The clouds spoke of rain since mid-morning, but only in a distant whisper, and in jest. Nothing at all appeared on the weather radar that I watch like an ancient shaman watches bird entrails for signs of what might be. Once again, we were taunted with the hope of rain. Oh how those first drops would seem miraculous, the ordinary become extraordinary, sacred and hallowed, if only they would come. Soon.

And then they came. Three large, fat drops on the pavers outside the porch door. Then nothing, only a high hot wind. I lay down on the walk and watched the clouds form demons and cherubs, but a gray, flat, featureless raincloud would have been the most beautiful cloud of all. So intent on the vision overhead, I had not heard the first hints of rustling down our valley to the south. Wind? Rain? Both?

Obviously, what you are seeing here (as outlined by our expert technicians to facilitate your grasp of this arcane apparition) is a regally pampered and immaculately groomed, rather small Poodledog Princess, lying on its side (facing left of image), expectantly, on an affordable, adjustable deluxe Craftmatic Dog Bed at firmness setting 4.

Most significantly, our experts, by means of highly-technical graphics enhancement techniques, have revealed a part of the image that was initially just out of view to left of image, showing the Finger of the Hand of God approaching, poised to tickle the Royal Belly of the Heavenly Poodle. I think you will agree, this is life-altering. I may start my own denomination.

I mentioned last night that I had tangled with some bad critters...these Saddleback Caterpillars are all over the corn! I gave you a link to go see them, and a few more venomous caterpillars. But no, I'm not content to let my readers go look at somebody else's photos from some inferior garden other than ours here on (what used to be) Goose Creek (before the current drought).

I am serious here, folks. Get to know this one. Do not pet. Check out those needle-like hairs both fore and aft on this seductively beautiful larva. They break off in your skin. They are poison tipped. Bactine doesn't do squat to put out the fire. I have seen it recommended to cover the stung area with adhesive tape, and pull off the tape in hopes of pulling out the almost microscopic stinging hairs. Cussing loudly also seems to help.

Final judgement regarding the TRUE MEANING of the cloud image will be posted tomorrow.

I think it's the Apotheosis of the Michelin Man, painted on an 18th-century Viennese ceiling. The cherubs and pegasus-chariots and the Empress Maria Theresa (smiling, clutching a wreath of laurel to her bosom)are just outside of the frame to the left. Barbara of Pinniped

This is some kind of sneaky Rorschach, isn't it?! I see a crazed Michelin man, mouth open in an angry roar, leaning forward with his right arm extended... to do what? Who knows. susanna cornett of Cut on the Bias

I see a man drowning, trying to keep his head above water. (She wonders if it might not be O. Bin Laden, hiding up there). Michelle

It is a dalmation puppy on his back, in a vice. (The head is the roundish greyer part at the top.) Ol' buddy, Dennis Stamper

I see a large curly haired dog with a pronounced brow that shades its eyes, a large bulbous nose perched above an open mouth which holds an invisible regulator because it is certain this dog is scuba diving (tank at upper right)

I also see .. if you take the dog, it's nose becomes a young lad along with his sister to his right, on a magical journey on the open-mouthed flying clam they are lying upon. The sister has one leg kicked up and points at something below, or perhaps at the mouth of the clam. Maybe it had an itch.

If you want to make it sinister, the children are unaware of the beast whose bulky paws hover right behind them, and whose beaked head looms above.

The forementioned scuba tank/monster also looks like Gonzo the Great. Jen the Imaginative (who left no forwarding address but may be out grazing among the funny mushrooms somewhere in a Texas pasture, under high puffy clouds).

I see a big curmudgeon, but what I notice the most is how much the picture looks like an illustration by Howard Pyle or N.C. Wyeth. Possumblog Terry, The Esteemed and Philosophical, Pensive and Erudite Chief of the Pouched Mammals.

A roasted marshmallow ready to be eaten. Kevin McGehee

Without having read the comments from others, I took one look at this picture and saw the exact same thing as susanna...a malevolent cloud-god staring down and to the left with a look of fury and wrath. Yikes!!! Curt the Curteous from Hotlanta

I saw the figure of God reaching out to man from the Sistine Chapel. Kehaar/Sifllay Hraka

A de-horned Minotaur, sitting at a small circular table, conversing with an owl perched on an overturned napkin dispenser. Bigwig/Siflay Hraka

I see a herd of cats in Fez's.
Bene Diction Blogs On

I have to say, I've looked at life from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow, I really don't know clouds, at all. But I do know that, in spite of your deep meditative states while considering the message in the cloud image, no one got it exactly right. I am very sorry.

I was there. I saw the whole thing in context. I know The Truth! Of course there is always room for error. Consequently, I have handed the photo over to our forensics laboratory for substantiation of authenticity and confirmation of my conclusions regarding what is the REAL meaning of the creatures in the clouds. The judges decision will be posted tomorrow morning.

We are living, 'temporarily' with my mother. I have no job and no income. My wife (who found work in the first 30 minutes in town as a pharmacist) is severely pregnant, and expecting in 4 months, which will also mark an end to the income, at least for a while. The job market in my area is saturated, the economy is stagnant or worse, with the 'Arab Oil Embargo' of the early 70's sending gas prices out the roof. So...off to the classified ads. This, I am convinced, is going to be humbling.

"Salesmen needed. On commission. Training provided. Limited openings"

Oh, this seemed promising. Turns out that I would be selling fire alarms, door to door. Training consisted of one 45 minute session where I was instructed in the pitch and provided with my 'kit'. The kit consisted of a cheap briefcase containing a cheap tape recored that played a canned program of background music in a minor key, and a laminated flip book. The flip book consisted of pictures of various disastrous home fires, complete with pictures of the victims in various states of bar-be-qued repose, some more or less still alive after the fire, but pitifully bandaged and miserable.

My initial task: find a victim, arrange an "educational opportunity", attend the session with the clients, call the supervisor from the victims home so that he can deliver the highly polished version of the pitch, once the shoeleather salesperson (me) has foot in the door. Oh crap. This is going to be humbling. I watch myself going through the motions in a kind of out-of-body experience.

Fred rings doorbell of formerly friendly neighbors. He greets Mr. and Mrs. Anderson with half apologies, while trying to give off vapors of confidence, conviction and zeal. Finally after some small talk, he sits down and begins his first maneuver toward future wealth and financial security. Lots of biology majors across the country are probably doing exactly the same thing right this minute, he thought... a thought that provided little in the way of encouragement.

Start tape. Canned documentary music begins and melliflous NPR announcer voice recites the statistics of home fires, damages in dollars to the average home owner, insurance red tape, and of course it alludes to 'the horrible prospect of personal injury'. Here the brief introduction ends, and it is now time for the shoeleather salesperson, Fred, to begin the 'face to face' portion of the educational opportunity.

(Open glossy laminated flip book while minor-key music continues a low volume in the background, for emotional impact). The hapless salesman begins:

(Turn first pages of flip book slowly, where Mr. and Mrs. Anderson can see...like one would do when reading a picture book to very small children).

"Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, you have a wonderful home here. You have worked hard and you should be able to sleep peacefully through the night without concern about losing everything that is dear to you." (Flip a few more pages, looking very solemn, pause through a moment of pregnant silence before continuing).

"Mr. and Mrs. Anderson (salesman is instructed to use client names repeatedly ad nauseum): The charred body of this child in the body bag here could be any one of you".

At that moment of intense personal integrity-crisis, Fred returned to his body from the ceiling where he had been watching this disgusting, and oh-so-demeaning experience.

"I'm sorry folks. That's about all of this I can go through. I apologize for taking your time tonight. I can't go through with this." At about that time, the phone range. The homeowner answered; it was my supervisor and I asked to speak to him. He asked how it was going.

"Oh it is going fine. It is going great. My kit is going back where it came from and I am going to get a real job and I am going to stop payment on the check for my death-by-cremation kit. And I'm gone." And I hung up. Oh, that felt good. And what a relief!

Possumblog, Silflay Hraka, and Cut on the Bias have pointed their readers to the Cloud Rorschach Test. Entries are trickling in. Tension is mounting. Who will have THE ANSWER to LIFE, the UNIVERSE, and EVERYTHING? (and if you know that it's 42, don't tell).

Greetings to Eleanor, who does a wonderful work at Mossbern Animal Rescue Centre where "we rescue misused, abused, unwanted and neglected animals, and provide therapeutic work placements for children and adults with problems. Our aim is to enhance the lives of both people and animals through our work". She visits Fragments from near Glasgow...a most wonderful area we were pleased to visit last year in our brief travels to Ireland and Scotland.

This Sunflower picture, then, is symbolic of the end of things...summer's last hurrah, and probably the last in a string of 'bug cameos' from the garden. Of all the various insect images this summer, this one was hardest to capture, and least like what I had envisioned, not that the average casual viewer much cares for the technical considerations behind an image. I'll burden you with it, anyway.

Strongly backlit in the mid-afternoon sun, the ray flowers (yellow-petalled edges of the flower) were strikingly brilliant. The disk flowers (the parts that turn into edible sunflower seeds) were being swarmed by at least a dozen bumblebees that looked like so many carnival bumper-cars as they coursed over the flower, as it bobbed in and out of focus, in the breeze. (You DID know that members of the aster or sunflower family have 'composite' inflorescences, consisting of disk flowers and ray flowers, didn't you?)

So, a passer-by (of which we have a half-dozen, daily) would have seen a tall man standing on a 5-gallon plastic bucket in the corn, under an 8-foot sunflower, holding his cap in one outstretched hand (to keep glare off the lens), the camera in the other, up precariously close to a dozen bumblers, while teetering, sweating and cussing quietly to himself, and of course, to the bees.

Creative dilemma: expose for the rays which are in blinding sun. This throws the central part of the flower 2-3 stops underexposed, dark and without detail. Or, expose for the disk flowers and the bees, which, as you see here, puts the ray flowers into extreme overexposure, to the point of disappearing...as if the entire flower exists floating, unfixed and fading off into the ethers. Rather like the disk of the sun, sending out cosmic yellow petals into the depths of space. (a bit too saccharine, hmmm?)

They grow over on our pasture road, but are few in number, disappointingly small, and the turkeys almost always find them the day they reach their sweetest state...the day that we had said "lets go pick the wild strawberries today".

Like Bartram, the original red berries were 'pioneers', colonizing bare ground that had been burned. Burning, either by Native Americans in their efforts to increase browse for game animals, or resulting from lightning, were common across the southeast, leaving vast areas empty of vegetation. The 'scarlet berry', as it was called, thrived as an early colonizer, and spread readily. The first settlers here quickly discovered its sweet taste and fragrant smell. Strawberry fields, strawberry plains (names still present in the south) lured Sunday picknikers to pick gallons of scarlet berries....no minor effort as the native berries were much smaller than those we purchase today in the grocery stores.

Another similar species from the Pacific coast called the Chili Berry produces large, pale berries of poor taste. Both plants eventually ended up in a European gardens, where anything from the New Country was eagerly cultivated. In one particular garden in the Netherlands, both the chili berry and the scarlet berry were planted close together. Enough similar that one was able to accept pollen from the other, a hybrid was formed, with the best qualities of each: large, hardy, scarlet and sweet.

What do you see in these clouds that I photographed from the jet window, a year ago today?

Cloud creatures can range from the sublime to the ridiculous (and we can already guess a few bloggers with potential for imaginations on steroids). One hyper-imaginative reader (and you know who you are) in a recently posted cloud picture here on Fragments sees "a sheep dog, but in particular, Ruff, Dennis the Menace's dog, with a corncob pipe in his mouth, holding his head at a jaunty MacArthuresque angle".

More at Space.com Wa