Mary Lou, the flowering dogwood outside my window, is changing color – again. Her previously green leaves, shaped with the compound curves of Pringles chips with pointy ends, are turning bright rust-colored as she shuts down the conduits that for the past few months have transported nutrition from the earth on which she stands, to be processed in those then-green solar collectors into more branches and, now, a mass of red berries among the buds that will open next spring into a glorious bouquet of pink ad white four-petaled flowers.
Author: John Messeder
Plane, mountains and strangers
Being a tourist in distant countries has been an eye-opener.
I was stationed in Rota, Spain with the U.S. Navy. It was a six-month deployment with my Jacksonville, Florida-based patrol squadron, during which time we flew patrols to keep track of what the Russian navy was doing in and near the Mediterranean Sea.
Vaccines and loaded trucks
Questioning authority has been a well-documented life-long pursuit of mine, so I do not fault folks for arguing with the way the government has handled this pandemic, or which government may have sourced it.
But we have bodies stacking up around the globe – more than 690,000 and piling in the U.S. alone. We know how to stop that.
We can argue the other points next, not first.
Virtual storytelling
Have you ever pulled yourself hand-over-hand hundreds of feet to the top of a California Redwood and tied your hammock among gardens of plants and critters that had never walked the ground from whence you came?
Logically speaking, it’s illogical
Spock would have a fit. We humans have an amazing gift for ignoring logic.
Why, for instance, would we think putting salt on our winter roads is bad because it pollutes nearby water and wetlands, yet we’re willing to accept water laced with radioactive and chemically laced salts we would not allow on our dinner tables, declaring them “safe when used as directed.”
The sky was falling
Vigorously. That is what we say when the clouds pour their liquid load on our house.
I have awakened the past few mornings to grayer skies lighting, dimly, my bedroom. I lay there torn between competing imperatives: I should stay in bed and read or go back to sleep, and I should be up already finding some constructive endeavor with which to occupy my attention.
Context is everything
Submitted for your consideration: a new television offering.
“The Chair” is a dramedy – part drama, part comedy – on Netflix starring Sandra Oh as the first woman chair of the English Department at a small liberal arts college.
Guns not the best tools
Our withdrawal from Afghanistan has been seasoned with descriptions of Taliban treatment of women. As I listened to the stories, I harkened back to a time when policies across this nation were not as different as we would like to believe.
Water pollution is like a virus
Wednesday, California became the first state to require all school staff to get vaccinated or agree to regular testing. President Biden has said maybe federal employees can avoid being vaccinated if they are willing to be tested regularly for Covid.
Trees need love, too
Black cherry is what it is called by the app on my phone that identifies most trees accurately. To me, it just looks lonesome for want of children to swing from its branches.
New residents welcome: Bring water
When the merits of “sustainable” growth are mentioned, the factor most often mentioned is more revenue for the local treasury.
Dumping out of sight
Jeff Bezos wants to move our pollution problems to space.
Continue reading Dumping out of sight
He really wanted to know
Much of what follows was a column I wrote 20 years ago, almost to the week. My then-newly declared life partner and I had returned from a celebratory cruise around the Caribbean. We had visited the Yucatan Peninsula, Grand Cayman Island, and Jamaica, and spent a couple of days at sea, being waited on. Not a bad life – for a week.
3-D printers and fireflies
I am sitting on the back deck, watching eight squirrels cavort around the grass and through the flower beds, trees and roof. A few House Sparrows arrive looking for breakfast, as do a pair of Mourning Doves and another of Northern Cardinals.
Guaranteed safety not included
I worked for a time in the Navy with a man who loved hunting, fishing, and generally being outdoors, but whose wife, he often said, defined “roughing it as a Holiday Inn without a swimming pool.”
Masterful pranksters
A tree can take a decade to spread its arms in a morning yawn. Only rocks live longer. But trees are way more mischievous.
I stumbled recently upon a tree stump, clearly cut with human tools. The stump, however, had been split many years earlier by what must have appeared to the then-seedling, to be a huge wedge of sandstone, like a steel wedge placed by a woodsman preparing a cord of winter heat.
What to do if you lose your compass
I sometimes go for a week or more without getting into the woods, then I go there and remember why I was feeling so badly about not.
I was able to visit my dry vernal pool Monday. Sure enough, a few of the recent rain clouds passed over and made it a pool with water in it. I shot a few minutes of underwater video and there clearly were multiple somethings, looking like translucent polliwogs, swimming around in there. Really tiny, but a few got to the correct focal distance and I could see their bulbous heads and skinny tails trailing behind like pieces of thread in need of a pair of scissors.
Tell the tadpoles
Tuesday morning there was a serious rain event in my neighborhood, too late for the tadpoles I had been watching in a pool up in Michaux State Forest.
I started photographing them at the end of March, when they were newly hatched.
The First of June marked nine weeks I had been visiting and photographing them. It’d been about a week since I’d last seen them and they did not have legs. They should have grown legs soon, but the lack of rain has transformed the vernal pool into a vernal bed of rapidly drying leaves.
Block hackers; Buy local
A few years ago, I visited my son and his family in Cincinnati. At the major-chain grocery near his home, I bought some “fresh” apples. At the first bite, I understood why city kids – at least the kids whose parents bought from that store – did not like fresh fruit.
I have tried to eat wooden decorative apples that were easier to chew, and with more flavor.
Why the old man laughs
Somewhere near the head of a stream, water seeps slowly into a flaw in the granite. Winter cold freezes the mixture of oxygen and hydrogen into an expanding wedge that forces the boulder to crack in two pieces, then more. Gradually, over several winters, the stream grows larger and the boulder pieces smaller.