There’s no way to capture the blue that the sky was today. It shifted through a spectrum of blue from power to powder to cobalt. The blue of a sky like today’s sky settles in my skin and warps around all the contours and makes itself a part of me. What is so compelling about a cloud-devoid heaven? Is it the forever falling upwards, the lift of your head, the endless eye?
There is another moth inside the house on the wall. I don’t know what kind it is, but there have been several of this particular kind in the house during the past few weeks. They are sturdy and brown and look a little like a very small autumn leaf with legs and antennae. I wish I had antennae. The furry kind, not the snail kind, nor the kind on the radio or televison or the car. Un-aerial, yet feathery.
If you google-search antenna images the only kind you get are man-made, metal, directional, mechanical, wireless. I had to change to antennae to find the biological kind. Appendages, they call them. Appendages! Appending from! PROTRUDING. I prefer feelers.
We have trapped and released at least 3 moths (of the same brown/sturdy variety…perhaps it is the SAME one being persistant! Perhaps he would like to be ADOPTED. Sorry, moth. I draw the line at bug legs), 2 burnt-sienna autumn-colored butterflies and 3 wasps and/or bees. I can’t tell the last apart unless I look closely and frankly, I’m more interested in getting them quickly out of the house than I am in identification. I don’t like the name wasp much. It’s so short and stingy. I prefer yellowjackets. Though that does give them a certain je ne sais quoi that perhaps they don’t deserve.
It occurs to me as I read back over that last paragraph that you, my reader, might read the word stingy as meaning miserly whereas in my head I was pronouncing it STING-EE. Sting-y. A little searching seems to confirm that there is no adjective form meaning sting-like or sting-ish or sting-inducing, other than stinging, which to me, implies a certain immediacy to the event of the sting, when what I want is the implication of imminence. Seems a shame, since sting-y works so very well.
I love that about English. Its morphable ability to birth new words simply by grabbing a suffix or prefix and appending it to an existing noun or verb or particle.
We are all very busy once again. Or still, depending on how you look at it. Established routine has been re-established. Work and school and after- activities have begun, one by one. We are falling into fall. Wheeling into autumn, slowly pulling our hearts from summer’s relaxed embrace and turning to face the speeding churn of year’s end.
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In other news, I will be heading to Massachusetts at the end of next week to work from our US office for 2 weeks. Has anyone been to any of the following places/attractions and if so, can you give me any recommendation? Were they awesome or terrible or expensive? Was there something else in the area that you think was a much more important not-to-be-missed item to add to the list for my mom & I? We have a limited amount of days and too many things on our list. These are the things we are considering:
- Ben & Jerry’s Factory Tour
- Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden
- Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art
- Drive along the coast
- Portsmouth
- Shelburne Falls
- Old Sturbridge Village
- Mystic, Connecticut Aquarium & Seaport
- Newport, Rhode Island
- Revolving Museum (creative expression & art)
- Sandwich Glass Museum
- Norman Rockwell Museum
- Whale watching (though this looks pricey AND I get sea-sick)
- Liberty Ride
- SoWa Antiques Market
- King Richard’s Faire
Two things I also have on the list are things I’ve already done (years ago) and which I would like to do again, but we’re not sure we want to go into Boston this time when there are so many things to do outside the city: the glass flower exhibit at Harvard Museum and the Map Room in the Mary Baker building at the Christian Science Center.
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Reminded of Beauty thanks to Sweet Juniper: Sylvia Plath’s Pheasant