retreat into nature and art

We got 4” or 5” of rain over four days from three storms. They're saying the rain came too late for the feed corn crop which tasseled already and the silk is turning brown but apparently the ears aren't developing kernels. The cotton was dying in the fields but is looking much better now so it may not be a total loss. The cotton field at the end of my street has large patches of brown where the little cotton plants had already died. It's been a bad year for tomatoes in people's gardens too having gotten too hot and dry too fast. They were going for $4 and $5 dollars a pound at the Farmer's Market on Saturday and they were all fairly small. Guess I won't be making my own tomato sauce this year, not with those prices and the basic scarcity.

I did stop to chat with one purveyor. He was selling his tomatoes for $4 a pound and I picked out two sort of medium sized tomatoes as we talked about how badly everyone's plants were doing this year and learned that he is one of the two men that bought the house that the people I buy my coffee from used to own. Janet and Jeff import organic fair trade coffee beans, roast them when they get an order, and then send it out. They bought a place in the Valley and moved several years ago. But this guy was a big man, tall, not overweight but solid, wearing a cowboy hat and I didn't notice right away but he had a pistol in a holster on his hip manning his booth at the Saturday Farmer's Market. I wonder what he thinks, wearing that gun, that he's going to be the hero, the good guy with the gun? That he's going to defend his vegetables from a would be thief?

And just a day or two after Uvalde someone posted on the local FB chat that some teenagers were pulling pranks like turning on outside faucets. One woman commented that they better hope they don't get shot. I was appalled, that someone thought shooting at a teenager because of a prank and possibly killing them would even occur to someone. But that's the country we live in now. Someone annoys you, maybe pisses you off, and that's reason enough to use lethal force.

Despite the rain, which cooled down temperatures for about a day and a half, it is so hot out there. And so of course our AC quit working Friday late so it was an after hours call on a holiday weekend. Yay! Just under $500 but we have cool air.

Saturday I planned to either work on my watercolor or the box. I did neither. But we did watch the first three episodes of Stranger Things season 1. I'm hooked. We also started watching Night Sky last week. Did I already mention that?

I am mentally, emotionally exhausted, angry with this nation's plunge into moral depravity fueled by the NRA and gun manufacturers and our greedy politicians who don't see the dead, only the money, who ridiculously attempt to justify these military grade weapons and hollow point ammo for the general public. So I'm going to lose myself in nature and art and leave you with pictures from the big backyard this morning.

Looked up yesterday late afternoon to see this tattered luna moth right outside my window.

Three views of the west side long flower bed. First image nile lilies, second image three elephant garlic flowers clustered together. Third image double orange daylilies in the foreground. You might remember I didn't get a single bloom out of these last year due to the arctic blast that sat on us for two weeks in the spring.