The Nature of Things

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr My rating: 5 of 5 stars Books about World War II or set in that period do not usually land on my "to be read" list, but this book was highly recommended to me by someone who knows my reading habits and tastes and has a good idea of what I will enjoy. And that's how I ended up reading a book set mostly during World War II. Thank goodness I did. All the Light We Cannot See is a lyrically written, hauntingly beautiful book about two young people, a German boy and a French girl, trapped in the maelstrom of war. The climactic action of the book takes place in August 1944, two months after D-Day, but Anthony Doerr gives us his main characters' background in flashbacks. Throughout much of the book, the brief but information-packed chapters alternate between telling the stories of the German boy, Werner, and the French girl, Marie-Laure. By the time we reach August 1944, we have observed the intricate web that, for one day, fi...

This is what the end of March looks like in my garden. The bluebonnets are blooming. American Goldfinches in their summer dress are passing through and stopping to have a snack at the nyger seed feeders. Over the weekend, I saw my first Giant Swallowtail butterfly of the year.  And my first Tiger Swallowtail of 2015. Just beautiful! But the stars of the show these days are the azaleas. For most of the year, their shrubs are inconspicuous, but in early spring they put on a show for us. Mine have never been so full of blooms as they are this spring. This is an old plant in the backyard garden.  This is one of the everblooming azaleas that I added to my front garden last fall. They had a few blooms all through the autumn and winter, but now, in spring, they are absolutely full of these bright blossoms. Spring in Southeast Texas is typically a very brief season. Some years, we go from winter to summer in the blink of an eye. This time, our winter ha...

We've had a string of perfect spring days recently. Nobody describes such days more eloquently than Billy Collins. Today BY  BILLY COLLINS If ever there were a spring day so perfect, so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze that it made you want to throw open all the windows in the house and unlatch the door to the canary's cage, indeed, rip the little door from its jamb, a day when the cool brick paths and the garden bursting with peonies seemed so etched in sunlight that you felt like taking a hammer to the glass paperweight on the living room end table, releasing the inhabitants from their snow-covered cottage so they could walk out, holding hands and squinting into this larger dome of blue and white, well, today is just that kind of day. Redbud in bloom on March 28.

This is so incredible that I just have to share it - Black Swans feeding koi in a pond at a resort in Taiwan. How did this get started, I wonder? Were the swans feeding their cygnets and the koi took advantage and then when the little swans grew up the parents continued to feed the koi? I have no idea. Maybe some human trainer actually trained them to do this. Regardless of how it happened, I find it perfectly amazing!

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : "My" American Goldfinches , the ones that spent the winter in my yard, are long gone now. The last of them left at least three weeks ago. But we have had some goldfinches visiting us this week. They are birds that spent the winter even farther south and are now passing through on their way to their nesting grounds. Many of the ones I've seen this week have already been fully dressed in their breeding colors of yellow, white, and black. This one had not quite made the transition yet but he's almost there. These are birds on a mission of reaching their nesting grounds and establishing their territories, so they do not linger. This one moved on within twenty-four hours of the time this picture was taken. *~*~*~* The North Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland has proved to be an anomaly in the record of warming trends on the planet. While Earth as a whole is heating up and last winter was the hot...

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead My rating: 4 of 5 stars Having recently read Middlemarch for the first time and having loved the experience, I was intrigued by this title. I remembered having read a couple of positive reviews of the book when it first came out over a year ago and I decided that now was the time for me to read it, while Middlemarch is still fresh in my mind. Rebecca Mead, a writer for The New Yorker , first read the book when she was seventeen. She has reread it numerous times in the decades since then and feels a strong connection with it. She sees connections between the text and her own life and between George Eliot's life and hers. This book is an exploration of all those connections. It is part biography of Eliot, part autobiography, part literary criticism and memoir of how the book came to be written. Some critics described it as a bibliomemoir and that seems apt. I actually felt the title proved to be a bit misleading. The book was more about El...

It's my sweetie's birthday, and it's a big one this year. One of those with a zero. It's time to pause and be thankful for all those years, especially the forty spent with me! So, another year older, but never mind. My heart's eyes will always see him as forever young.

It's Wildflower Wednesday once again, the meme hosted each month by Gail of clay and limestone . It's a chance to feature and recognize the wonderful native plants that live in our gardens and habitats, plants that are happily utilized by the wildlife that also share our living spaces. Today, I'm featuring a plant that managed by some mysterious means to reseed itself into my yard a few years ago. I happened to notice it and liked the look of it, so I dug it and potted it up to see what would happen. The next year it came back and bloomed again and I decided to plant it in the corner of one of my beds in the garden. It has lived there happily ever since and it continues to multiply, getting bigger and providing more blooms every spring. Wild onion, or Allium canadense to give it its proper name, is a member of the lily family. It has a long bloom cycle that can last from March until May. It is a low, upright clumped plant that grows from a small bulb and has no stem....

I guess I've complained enough about my rain-spoiled birding vacation in the Rio Grande Valley. It was a week I had long looked forward to, since it is one of the birdiest places on the planet. I was hoping to see lots of new birds. That didn't quite work out, thanks to the weather, but, in fact, I did see quite a few birds. I even managed to get pictures of some of them. This group of Roseate Spoonbills was resting at mid-day in the wetlands of the World Birding Center on South Padre Island.  Also at South Padre was this Long-billed Curlew . A pair of Mottled Ducks napping in the sun - the first sun we had seen in several days. This was one of the two Red-breasted Mergansers I saw and was able to photograph at South Padre. Green-winged Teal were quite common in the ponds at Estero Llano Grande State Park. Lovely ducks! As were the very distinctive Northern Shovelers . I wasn't able to photograph very many songbirds that I saw, but th...

A Matter of Justice by Charles Todd My rating: 4 of 5 stars A London financial advisor named Quarles is respected and admired by his compatriots in the City, but he lives a different life altogether in the small village where he maintains a second home where he can "rusticate" to get away from business. There, he is known as a man who pursues women against their wishes, often married women or very young girls. He is just about universally hated by his neighbors there and so when he turns up dead in rather appalling circumstances, most of them will freely admit that they are glad he is dead and would have been happy to kill him themselves. All of which does not make the work of the police investigating the crime any easier. The man was very important in the business world and lived as the local squire in the village and so when he is murdered the local constable calls on Scotland Yard for assistance. If it means a trip to the provinces, it's another chance for his super...

The changing of the seasons is another occasion for us to reflect upon the meaning of Nature and the place of humans in it. And while we glory in the beauties of early spring, it is also rather appalling to see "what man had made of made." That was obvious even long ago to William Wordsworth. The more things change, the more they remain the same.  Lines Written in Early Spring William Wordsworth ,  1770  -  1850 I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind. To her fair works did nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man. Through primrose tufts, in that sweet bower, The periwinkle trailed its wreaths; And ‘tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes. The birds around me hopped and played: Their thoughts I cannot measure, But the least motion which ...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : When we visited Estero Llano Grande State Park last week. the pond near the visitor's center was full of ducks, including all three species of teal. When I uploaded my pictures later, I realized I had captured all three of the species in this shot. The Green-winged Teal is on the far left and far right. A male Cinnamon Teal is second from the right and a male Blue-winged Teal is third from the right. The other two birds appear to be a female of one of the species and another Green-winged male - all beautiful birds. *~*~*~* The famous Cliff Swallows of San Juan Capistrano in California traditionally returned to their nesting grounds on March 19, the feast day of St. Joseph. Through the years, the numbers of the birds that nest at the mission have declined. Few nest there today, but still many people turn their eyes to the skies over the mission on that date, watching and waiting for the birds' return .  ...

The Five Bells and Bladebone by Martha Grimes My rating: 3 of 5 stars Well, in a very, very long series such as Martha Grimes' Richard Jury, I guess we can't expect every entry to be a winner. This one was a bit of a letdown, which actually surprised me because it started out as if it would be very entertaining, but somewhere around the two-thirds mark, it seemed to lose its way and the last third really meandered around trying to find that way once again. But it never did. In the end, I would award it two-and-a-half stars, but since I can't do a half-star here, I'll be generous and make it three. The story briefly is this: Richard Jury is finally getting some well-deserved vacation time. He plans to spend it in the little village of Long Piddleton with his good friend, the fabulously wealthy Melrose Plant. Things look promising as he arrives in town and we get to meet all the Long Piddleton characters we've come to know in earlier books, including the extremely...

A False Mirror by Charles Todd My rating: 2 of 5 stars I found this ninth in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series a bit of rough going. It was hard to work up much interest in the plot or in the main characters. The whole premise of the story just seemed rather unbelievable. As always, the plot is tied to the experiences of World War I. In this instance, the connection is through a man with whom Ian Rutledge had served in the war, a man who returned from the war to find the woman that he had been in love with now married to another older, richer man of a higher social class. When that man is severely beaten and left for dead, suspicion falls upon Rutledge's former comrade in arms. When the police go to question the man, he goes a bit off the tracks and runs over the constable's foot with his car as he makes his escape. Instead of leaving the area, he makes his way to the house of the victim where, in a strange encounter with the man's wife, she gives him her husband's ...