Greenleaves, greensleeves
Apr. 10th, 2002 06:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gurdonarkLeaves just appeared last week, as if they did not grow so much as materialize. I wish that some Spring Saturday I could spend the whole day watching leaves grow, because I'm convinced that some of these trees had noticeable movement. The only time I can remember a plant having noticeable movement is the sensitive plant at the Cleveland Avenue School in Camden, Arkansas. Touch the plant and it closes its fern-like leaves. My grandparents' home was a few blocks from the school--my grandmother taught there. My grandmother's place was full of cool nature--roly polys (sowbugs) I'd capture and use to stage huge "races" on the porch,
Texas grasshoppers, all black-metal-armored looking, which we'd avoid because an untrue urban myth said they were poisonous to the touch.
When I lived in La Crescenta, CA, I got to see a Jerusalem cricket. A huge cricket that looks
like a giant ant, but mostly lives buried deep underground. The news last week said that they had discovered a new huge species of this cricket.
Last summer, at Lake Ray Roberts, a gorgeous
state park an hour and fifteen minutes northwest of here, I saw scads of velvet ants. Velvet ants are really wasps (every child in the south has found this out in a paintful but decorative way by picking one up and meeting with a stinging education), but they look like child's paintings of giant ants. That same park has zebra butterflies, black and yellow stripes--only
a sliver of Texas/Oklahoma and the Florida Keys have this kind, and I was delighted to see some in Key Largo. It's time to plant a butterfly bush here.
When I was a kid, my mother was musical.
She had been a marimba champion of some sort
in high school, and even had a sort of jazz band (read: popular swing) that played her local small town radio station one evening a week, for which they were paid the wages of a steak dinner. Her father had bought the marimba second hand, from a travelling evangelist, whose obligations had outrun his grace, and had to sell on his way to find more fertile fields for the gospel [parenthetically, Camden, Arkansas, is the home of the postal employee who successfully lobbied to get "In God We Trust" on the coin, which may sum Camden up in one line].
My sister, who is artistically skilled in nearly every way, somehow came "out of the box" playing music by ear. Like some savant, she even plays extraordinarily ornate arrangements by ear. My brother and I were much less gifted. He played the recorder for some time, and may yet be able to play. I took years of piano lessons, to almost no effect.
My mother got a chromaharp, which is a kind of autoharp, when I was a teen. I took it off to law school, and taught myself to play. This is no difficult feat, as basic chording of an autoharp is not very difficult. When I got out working on my own, I bought a used electric autoharp from a musician who advertised it in the greensheet. He looked sad that he had to sell, and I suspected that if he marshalled his assets more wisely
he might not have had to sell. But I plunked down my hundred dollars, and in the novel of my life
we leave this character behind without ever knowing if he *had to sell* or if he really just *needed rehab* or *needed to stop pretending to earn a living at music and get a job*. I don't play with my autoharp as often My Inner Critic says I should, but it was fun during Christmas to pull out my mom's autoharp and play a few things, including Greensleeves. "Alas, my love....".
Texas grasshoppers, all black-metal-armored looking, which we'd avoid because an untrue urban myth said they were poisonous to the touch.
When I lived in La Crescenta, CA, I got to see a Jerusalem cricket. A huge cricket that looks
like a giant ant, but mostly lives buried deep underground. The news last week said that they had discovered a new huge species of this cricket.
Last summer, at Lake Ray Roberts, a gorgeous
state park an hour and fifteen minutes northwest of here, I saw scads of velvet ants. Velvet ants are really wasps (every child in the south has found this out in a paintful but decorative way by picking one up and meeting with a stinging education), but they look like child's paintings of giant ants. That same park has zebra butterflies, black and yellow stripes--only
a sliver of Texas/Oklahoma and the Florida Keys have this kind, and I was delighted to see some in Key Largo. It's time to plant a butterfly bush here.
When I was a kid, my mother was musical.
She had been a marimba champion of some sort
in high school, and even had a sort of jazz band (read: popular swing) that played her local small town radio station one evening a week, for which they were paid the wages of a steak dinner. Her father had bought the marimba second hand, from a travelling evangelist, whose obligations had outrun his grace, and had to sell on his way to find more fertile fields for the gospel [parenthetically, Camden, Arkansas, is the home of the postal employee who successfully lobbied to get "In God We Trust" on the coin, which may sum Camden up in one line].
My sister, who is artistically skilled in nearly every way, somehow came "out of the box" playing music by ear. Like some savant, she even plays extraordinarily ornate arrangements by ear. My brother and I were much less gifted. He played the recorder for some time, and may yet be able to play. I took years of piano lessons, to almost no effect.
My mother got a chromaharp, which is a kind of autoharp, when I was a teen. I took it off to law school, and taught myself to play. This is no difficult feat, as basic chording of an autoharp is not very difficult. When I got out working on my own, I bought a used electric autoharp from a musician who advertised it in the greensheet. He looked sad that he had to sell, and I suspected that if he marshalled his assets more wisely
he might not have had to sell. But I plunked down my hundred dollars, and in the novel of my life
we leave this character behind without ever knowing if he *had to sell* or if he really just *needed rehab* or *needed to stop pretending to earn a living at music and get a job*. I don't play with my autoharp as often My Inner Critic says I should, but it was fun during Christmas to pull out my mom's autoharp and play a few things, including Greensleeves. "Alas, my love....".
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no subject
Date: 2002-04-10 06:34 am (UTC)You were a braver kid than I was with those velvet ants-- I wouldn't have picked
one up on a bet. Striped black and blood red, furry, fat, and almost as big as my
kid-sized thumb-- they scared me just to look at 'em. I loved to harrass fire ants, and
those black ants that lived in trees were fun to play with, but one look told me that
those big ol' ants were out of my league.
My part of the country (Louisiana north of New Orleans) was descended upon by those
black grasshoppers once. They were everywhere-- you'd have thought Moses had called a hit in on us.
Other bug memories: 17-year cicadas (cicadae to the Latinate, locusts to me), the yearly plague of love bugs, walking sticks, crawfish holes with the heaped-up mud
around them
crawdads and cicadas
I did get the bait nibbled away sometimes,which gave me just enough confidence to try again.
My late aunt had gorgeous pines in her huge front yard.
Cicadas vacated their shells along those pine trees on a frequent basis, which always caught my interest.
Remind me, Scott, to give you a code, so that you can
be a livejournal person rather than an anonymous face. e mail me and I'll get you such a thing.
varmints
Date: 2002-04-10 12:18 pm (UTC)zebra butterflies sound cool.
do you have hummingbirds, or other birds of note?
Re: varmints
hawks of every description, who serve as telephone wire sentinels whereever one goes. We have scissortail flycatchers, with foot long criss crossed tails, just beautiful. We have grackles and martins in profusion--live oak trees in springs are a constant wail of grackle cry. We get
all the jays and robins and masses of woodpeckers.
We get orioles and thrush and every kind of little
colorful finch-like bird. We have gorgeous great blue herons and cattle egrets filling prairies and
white herons and snowy egrets. The mockingbird imitates everything he or she hears, including
voices or cat's meows. We have killdeers, who look like sea birds, but instead run around the suburban lawns as if on a tracthome seashore. We have the noble roadrunner, who looks like something from an Aztec wall carving. We have flitters and sparrows and the ubiquitous house finch. We have crows the size of small dogs. Buzzards fly overhead constantly here.
Our local hummingbird is the Ruby-throated hummingbird, and we don't have the Anna's
or 12 other southern CA hummingbirds, nor the
24 Arizona hummingbirds here. We do have
a few stray offbeat species of hummingbird stop by on a seasonal basis, but all our hummingbirds are summer visitors rather than year round.
We are on lots of flyways, Canadian geese and
all sortsa ducks and every sort of flitting thing.
This is really a paradise for a birder. I'm not a birder, but merely a pedestrian, but I always love how many birds we have here.