The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
~Emily Dickinson
Textures, do you like them? I know some of you use them and I always think they’re so beautiful but mine never to seem to come out right.
Yet another abandoned building in my neighborhood.
(Speaking of cerulean, I just got a box of 64 Crayola crayons so I can participate in the 64 Colors Flickr group. Every week is a different color, it sounds like fun. I’m not sure cerulean is one of the 64 colors but it is one of the 133 Crayola colors.)
Ah, Arizona!
The devil wanted a place on earth
Sort of a summer home,
A place to spend his vacation
Whenever he wanted to roam.
So he picked out Arizona
A place both wretched and rough,
Where the climate was to his liking
And the cowboys hardened and tough.
He dried up the streams in the canyons
And ordered no rain to fall.
He dried up the lakes in the valleys
Then baked and scorched it all.
Then over his barren country
He transplanted shrubs from hell.
The cactus, thistle and prickly pear
The climate suited them well.
Now the home was much to his liking
But animal life, he had none.
So he created crawling creatures
That all mankind would shun.
First he made the rattlesnake
With its forked poisonous tongue.
Taught it to strike and rattle
And how to swallow its young.
Then he made scorpions and lizards
And the ugly old horned toad.
He placed spiders of every description
Under rocks by the side of the road.
Then he ordered the sun to shine hotter,
Hotter and hotter still,
Until even the cactus wilted
And the old horned lizard took ill.
Then he gazed on his earthly kingdom
As any creator would,
He chuckled a little up his sleeve
And admitted that it was good.
‘Twas summer now and Satan lay
By a prickly pear to rest.
The sweat rolled off his swarthy brow
So he took off his coat and vest.
“By Golly,” he finally panted,
“I did my job too well,
I’m going back to where I came from,
Arizona is hotter than Hell.”
(Unknown)
Happy Summer!
The previous sunflowers I’ve photographed this spring have been from the alley behind my house and down a little ways. They seem to be there by accident and don’t belong to anyone in particular. But the other day, while sitting out front, I noticed a house down the street that had a yard full of sunflowers. The wind was blowing and they were bobbing their yellow heads furiously.
I went down there and they had several rows of sunflower plants. Not knowing them at all and hearing dogs barking from their backyard, I didn’t do what I would have liked to have done…laid under them and shot upwards. I didn’t even trespass on their property, being a chicken. They must be nice people, though, to love sunflowers so much, right?
These are a different variety of sunflowers than the ones in the alley as these have huge blooms, maybe 6 inches in diameter. The alley ones, below, are about 3 inches across.
I like sunflowers so much that I added a new piece to my vintage Mexican silver collection. Now I can wear a little bit of summer to work everyday.
“Bee hum… It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.”
(from The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd)
This plant is known in Arizona as Mexican Bird of Paradise. Apparently their correct name is Red Bird of Paradise. They are easy to grow in the desert. We had a Yellow Bird of Paradise in our backyard when we moved in but it was damaged in a storm and didn’t survive. These are a few houses down from me. I think we should get another one, they’re really beautiful and bees and hummingbirds love them.
