The Long Call by Ann Cleeves: A review

 

Ann Cleeves is an old pro at writing British mystery series. She has several to her credit already, including probably her most famous two, the Vera Stanhope series and the Shetland series, both of which were adapted for television. But now she has a new one. This is the first in that series featuring Detective Inspector Matthew Venn. It was published in 2019. The books are set in North Devon at the confluence of two rivers, the Taw and the Torridge, thus the "Two Rivers" series.  

We meet the protagonist, Matthew Venn, as he stands outside the church where his father's funeral is being conducted. Venn has long been estranged from his parents and he was not welcome at the funeral. The source of his estrangement is revealed to have been his rejection, in early adulthood, of the strict religious community called the Brethren. His parents were devoted to this group, essentially a cult, and had raised Matthew within the stern confines of its philosophy. But once he was old enough to think for himself he rejected it all completely and publicly, leading to an irrevocable break with his parents. Still, even though he no longer practices the religion, he continues to be influenced by its strict moral code.

As Matthew is leaving his post by the church, he receives a phone call informing him that a body has been found on the beach. As it happens the area where the body was found is quite near the house that Matthew shares with his husband, Jonathan. It is clear that the body, a man, was the victim of murder and when he is identified, we learn that he had a connection to the Woodyard, a community center that provides a place to work for artists as well as cultural and art lessons for the public. It also serves as a managed care facility for people who are unable to fully function on their own. The director of the center is Jonathan, which puts Matthew in a bit of an awkward position when it's learned that the dead man had worked in the kitchen there. But with Jonathan's encouragement, he decides to soldier on and work the case in spite of the possible conflict of interest.

Venn's sergeant is D.S. Jen Rafferty, a beautiful redhead originally from Liverpool. She still misses her hometown but she left because she was in an abusive marriage and after the divorce, she wanted a fresh start in a new location for herself and her two teenage children. Matthew considers her the best detective he's ever worked with. The other main member of his team is the brash young Ross May. He's not long on experience or people skills but he is the DCI's golden boy and Matthew is stuck with him.

As they get into the investigation, they learn that the murdered man had apparently befriended a young woman named Lucy who has Down Syndrome and who was served by the center. He rode the bus with her as she went home from the center each day and he sometimes gave her candy. The woman lives with her father, Maurice. When she sees a picture of the murdered man on television, she reacts strongly and her father informs the police that she knew him. Soon after, another young woman with Down Syndrome who went to the center is kidnapped. The woman is later found unharmed but dehydrated. She is unable to provide very much information about what happened to her. But then Lucy is kidnapped. What is going on here? And are the kidnappings related to the murder?

Cleeves gives us this story through revolving points of view from Venn, Jen Rafferty, and Maurice. The various points of view aid in developing the plot and interweaving discoveries made by the investigators. Through each of these points of view, we also learn a lot about the backstories of the characters and about the setting in beautiful North Devon. It is an engaging story and Cleeves performs her usual character development as a means of building the plot. This one develops rather slowly. After all, it is the first in a planned series so she takes care to thoroughly introduce us to the main characters. The story has some painful moments but it ends on a more hopeful and upbeat note and leaves us looking forward to the next entry in the series.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars    

Infinite Country by Patricia Engel: A review

 

This novel details the lives of a mixed-status, documented and undocumented, family of Colombian immigrants to this country as they struggle to survive and to elude the notice of the authorities. Mauro and Elena, with their baby daughter Karina, were led to emigrate in the first place by Colombia's long history of violence and the lack of economic opportunity there. They sought a better life for themselves and their daughter in the North. They gain tourist visas and arrive in Houston where they find jobs and send money back to Elena's mother in Bogota. When their tourist visas are close to their expiration date, they must make a decision whether to return to Colombia or overstay the visas. They choose to stay and thus undertake the precarious position of undocumented immigrants.

Their son, Nando, is born an American citizen. The family moves often to avoid detection by the authorities. A third child, another daughter named Talia, is born. And then their luck runs out. Mauro is arrested after an altercation and turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He is deported back to Colombia, leaving Elena with three small children to care for alone. She makes the gut-wrenching decision to send Talia to her mother in Bogota because Elena has to work and is really not able to care for a baby. Thus, Talia, an American citizen by birth, is raised in Bogota by her grandmother. Her father, meantime, has descended into alcoholism after his deportation and is not much of a presence in her life at this time, although he does visit her as often as the grandmother will permit it. It is through Talia's story that we get the narrative of twenty years of her family's history. 

As a teenager, Talia gets into trouble at school which leads to her being sent to a reform school. Her mother had bought her a plane ticket to return to the United States to her mother and siblings. Determined not to miss that upcoming flight, Talia escapes from the school and begins to make her way back to Bogota. She depends upon the kindness of strangers to get her there and her faith in strangers is rewarded. She is delivered back to the city to her father's apartment (her grandmother is long dead by this point) and he hides her until it is time for her flight. Talia is terrified that she will be discovered and stopped when she goes to the airport to take her flight, but she knows she must go. She makes it safely to the plane but is not able to relax and breathe easily until the plane is actually in the air. 

In telling the story of this family, Patricia Engel who is herself a child of Colombian parents weaves in a lot of the history and folklore of the Andean region. The best parts of her novel for me were those sections that were descriptive of the landscapes and mythology of the region. She also manages to powerfully convey the fraught atmosphere experienced by Elena and Mauro in America as they try to keep their family safe and at the same time remain under the radar so that their undocumented status is not detected. This is increased a hundredfold once Mauro is deported and Elena must try to make it on her own. The tension of their lives is almost unbearable and the knowledge that this is the reality of many immigrants to our country is itself an indictment of our entire immigration system.

This is the first and only novel that I can recall having read that eloquently tells the story of undocumented people in this country. I have known such people and have empathized with them but have truly never completely understood the peril of their lives or the emotional strain under which they live. I'm sure I still don't understand it fully but Patricia Engel has given us all a much closer look into those lives and for that, she is to be commended. 

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Poetry Sunday: Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Autumn crept over the windowsill on Wednesday last week. It brought with it some actual autumn-like weather - bright cool days with temperatures that never went above the 80s. It is a welcome respite from the heat of summer. It probably won't last. We'll likely have some summer days again before autumn sets in for good. But this time of year always brings to mind one of my very favorite poems because soon the wild geese will be winging this way, ready to settle down on our prairies and wetlands to spend their winter.  I know I've featured it here before but you can't have too much of a good thing and this poem is a very good thing.

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

This week in birds - #469

 A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

The Golden-winged Warbler is American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week. This is a bird of the forests that nests primarily in the Great Lakes states. Its numbers are in serious decline and its continued survival is threatened primarily by loss of suitable habitat.

*~*~*~*

The Biden administration has launched a government-wide strategy for combatting extreme heat. The strategy includes a plan to set standards for protecting workers from the impact of rising temperatures linked to climate change.

*~*~*~*

Oil and gas companies have a well-known history of drilling wells and then abandoning them, leaving them for others to clean up. Congress has a plan for plugging those abandoned wells but it seems that the taxpayers may be stuck with the bill for the cleanup rather than the oil and gas companies.

*~*~*~*

Six Ojibwe tribes in Wisconsin are suing the state in federal court over its planned autumn wolf hunt. They contend that their treaty rights are being violated by the plan.

*~*~*~*

We need trees and trees need us. It is good to know that some cities acknowledge that fact and are taking steps to protect their trees. 

*~*~*~*

Scientists have discovered a 220,000 square mile "seabird hotspot" southeast of Greenland where millions of marine birds spend their winters. Unfortunately, the area is also prey to winter storms that starve birds and contribute to massive die-offs.

*~*~*~*

This is a fossilized human footprint, one of many found at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. The footprints have been dated to about 23,000 years ago which would have been during the Ice Age. A study of the footprints has concluded that humans must have arrived in the Americas long before the Ice Age glaciers melted which would be significantly earlier than had been previously thought.

*~*~*~*

The mysterious epidemic that was killing birds in several states in the east earlier this summer has subsided. That's the good news. The bad news is that biologists and state wildlife managers are still not clear on the causes of the epidemic so that it might be prevented from happening again.

*~*~*~*

The Sunda clouded leopard, sometimes called the "tree tiger," exists on just two islands in southeast Asia and it is declining due to loss of habitat. The cat is dependent on forests and it lives in a region that is experiencing the world's fastest deforestation.

*~*~*~*

An indigenous non-profit coalition, the Seal River Watershed Alliance, is partnering with Audubon's Boreal Conservation program to save and protect the Seal River Watershed of northern Manitoba. They have deployed ten automated sound recording units in the watershed to record bird songs in order to identify the birds that use the area.

*~*~*~*

Project FeederWatch begins soon and you can be a part of it. You don't even need a bird feeder in order to participate. The data collected and reported by citizen scientists participating in the program provide important information about the location of birds in winter and the health of the population.

*~*~*~*

In a freak occurrence, 63 endangered African Penguins have been killed by a swarm of bees. The incident happened on a beach outside of Capetown. 

*~*~*~*

The new climate reality in the West seems to be drought. It affects people, of course, but it also affects birds and conservationists are working to try to make the arid West more livable for birds which would also make it more livable for people.

*~*~*~*

The invasive spotted lanternfly is a plant-eating threat to the U.S. environment and economy, but one line of defense against the pest is birds. Birds seem to find the insects quite tasty and are doing their bit to reduce the population.

*~*~*~*

The Dixie fire that swept across nearly one million acres in California is nearing its end but it has left a veritable moonscape in its wake.

*~*~*~*

The tar sands pipeline is sucking water from Minnesota watersheds and adversely affecting the lakes and the wild rice that grows in them. The Anishinaabe people who harvest the wild rice are rallying to try to stop the pipeline and save their lakes and the rice that they depend on.

*~*~*~*

The Revelator has a list of ten essential books to read about fighting climate change.

*~*~*~*

Dams on the Tittabawassee River in Michigan failed last year and that failure has led to the spread of a flood of invasive species. 

*~*~*~*

The first of three periodic reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that the climate is warming at an alarming and untenable rate. subsequent reports will deal with the impact and solutions to mitigate the effects of climate change.

*~*~*~*

A study suggests that the water released from dams in California that is intended to help the state's endangered salmon is actually not good at mimicking natural conditions and may not be helping the salmon that much.

*~*~*~*

You can bring more birds to your yard by planting some of the native plants that they rely on. Audubon has a database that allows you to enter your zip code and receive an email list of native plants that will do well in your area. 

*~*~*~*

An unconventional but environmentally friendly weapon against future wildfires is a herd of goats. Goats will eat the brush, grass, and leaves that other grazers can't reach or will turn up their noses at. It's just the type of vegetation that fuels wildfires. The goats have the added benefit of enriching the soil with their droppings. 

*~*~*~*

The Duck Stamp contest garners thousands of entries every year. Each entry is required to have a hunting theme and some subversive artists have taken that to rather hilarious extremes this year.

Billy Summers by Stephen King: A review

 

Billy Summers is a killer for hire. But he has his standards. He only kills bad men. Some of the men he has killed have been very bad indeed.

Billy was trained as a sniper in the military. When he got out, with no real prospects in view, he decided to use the killing skills he had learned. This is the "profession" that has sustained him in the years since. When we meet him though, he's decided he's had enough. He's ready to retire. But first, he's persuaded to take one last job. It is a job that will set him up for life. He gets a half a million dollars payment up front and will get one-and-a-half million when the job is completed. It's an offer he can't refuse.

In this final job, Billy will get to use his skills as a sniper. The man he's been hired (by a mob boss) to kill is being extradited from another state to face murder charges. His potential victim will be delivered to the steps of the courthouse near a rented office where Billy is pursuing his cover story of being a writer. And that's where Billy will take his shot.

Billy spends weeks in the town before the wheels of justice finally deliver the man to him. During that time, he adheres to the cover story by actually trying his hand at writing. He decides to write his life story, but in order to remain true to the dumb self persona he has perfected over the years, he assumes the voice of Benjy Compson, Faulkner's "idiot" child from The Sound and the Fury. This is only one of several literary references King makes in this book. He also mentions Dickens, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, and Cormac McCarthy, to name but a few. Billy is actually quite well-read and throughout the book, he is engrossed in reading Emile Zola's Therese Raquin.  Surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, he finds that he enjoys writing and that he has a knack for it. So in a reversal of The Shining where a writer became a killer, here the killer becomes a writer. Yes, King's literary references include himself!

Leading up to completing his job, Billy becomes concerned that there is a plan to get rid of him after he does the deed, and he makes alternative getaway plans. He holes up in a basement apartment in town instead of getting out of town as the mob boss had made arrangements for. While in his apartment one night, he sees three men in a van dump a girl's body on the street by where he lives. He goes out to check on her, finds her alive, and brings her inside. She had been drugged and gang-raped by the three men. I had been enjoying the book quite a lot up to this point, but this addition to the plot just seemed awkward and unnecessary to me. But there it is.

The woman is 21-year-old Alice and she and Billy develop quite a close but platonic relationship over the next several weeks.

All of this takes place in about the first third of the book. The rest of the book involves Billy, with Alice at his side, tracking down the mobster who had reneged on making the final payment for the job and his boss, a right-wing media tycoon (who sounds a lot like you-know-who) who had gotten the mobster to hire him. It is a rousing good tale and even though the book is not perfect, King's ability to keep the flow going and keep the story vivid is impressive. Maybe that's why he remains such a popular and successful writer year after year.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars 

The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny: A review

 

Louise Penny's latest mystery set in the little Quebec village of Three Pines takes place at a time in the future when the present pandemic has been officially declared over. Things are beginning to get back to normal, but the effects of the pandemic and its consequences are still very much on the minds of the residents. 

All of those Three Pines residents that we have come to know over the course of this series, characters who feel like our friends that we enjoy spending time with, are present and accounted for and Inspector Gamache is still on the job.

Gamache is marked by a horrendous experience he had during the pandemic. He was called to a nursing home where he discovered that the inmates had been abandoned. They were dead or dying. He feels shame, not that he himself had abandoned these people but that his society had abandoned them and that, as a senior police officer, he had not realized earlier that something like that could happen. 

Now it is late December and the holiday season is in full swing. At the height of it all, Gamache is called upon to provide security for a speaking event at a nearby college. When he learns who the speaker is, he is appalled.

The speaker will be Abigail Robinson, a controversial statistician who has been hired by the Canadian government to analyze the country's pandemic-related data. Her conclusion is that the sick and elderly used too many of the country's resources during the pandemic. They were going to die soon anyway but caring for them put a strain on the country's finances, medical supplies, and personnel. She proselytizes for a kind of eugenics and for rationing care for those who are least able to benefit from it. Disgusted by her conclusions and proposed solutions, Gamache asks the college chancellor to consider canceling the event. For his efforts, he is accused of stifling free speech.

The speech goes on and predictable chaos ensues and in the midst of it all, someone tries to shoot Robinson. Gamache pushes her down and the shot misses, but it is a near thing. However, soon after, Robinson's manager who is her close friend is killed while walking on a trail at night during a snowstorm. Could this have been a case of mistaken identity? Did the killer mistake her for Robinson? Gamache must answer those questions and determine a motive for the killing in order to figure out who did it.

Louise Penny's mysteries have always been firmly rooted in the social fabric and in the love of family and friends but she has never shied away from addressing difficult issues. The Madness of Crowds continues that tradition. She remarks upon the fact that crowds of people can lose social inhibitions and act with a disregard for law and norms of behavior. They can even perpetrate cruelty that they would not normally consider. They can, in fact, succumb to a form of insanity or madness. 

Gamache is concerned that if Robinson continues spreading her ideas that such madness may overtake his own society. This is very personal for him because his youngest grandchild, his daughter's baby has Down Syndrome. She would be one of those vulnerable people who Robinson believes it is a waste to spend resources on.

This is the darkest Penny mystery that I can recall, but as always, it is lightened by the beauty of Three Pines and all its quirky but lovable residents. It's always a pleasure to visit them again.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 

Poetry Sunday: Tell me not here, it needs not saying by A.E. Housman

This is one of A.E. Housman's most famous poems. It was published in 1922 and it speaks of the poet's relationship with and feelings about Nature. He seems to say that he feels a close bond with Nature, even though Nature is heartless and witless. It needs not saying that it takes no heed of him but he appreciates the gifts it gives.

Tell me not here, it needs not saying

by A. E. Housman

Tell me not here, it needs not saying,
What tune the enchantress plays
In aftermaths of soft September
Or under blanching mays,
For she and I were long acquainted
And I knew all her ways.

On russet floors, by waters idle,
The pine lets fall its cone;
The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells alone;
And traveller’s joy beguiles in autumn
Hearts that have lost their own.

On acres of the seeded grasses
The changing burnish heaves;
Or marshalled under moons of harvest
Stand still all night the sheaves;
Or beeches strip in storms for winter
And stain the wind with leaves.

Possess, as I possessed a season,
The countries I resign,
Where over elmy plains the highway
Would mount the hills and shine,
And full of shade the pillared forest
Would murmur and be mine.

For nature, heartless, witless nature,
Will neither care nor know
What stranger’s feet may find the meadow
And trespass there and go,
Nor ask amid the dews of morning
If they are mine or no.

This week in birds - #468

 A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment: 

The American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week is the Broad-winged Hawk. This is a hawk of the eastern forests. It is about the size of a crow. It is the smallest of the Buteo genus on this continent. If you are looking up during migration season, you might be fortunate enough to witness a "kettle" of Broad-wings. These are large groups of the migrating hawks that can number from a few dozen to several thousand.

*~*~*~*

It is the middle of the migration season and birds are dying by the thousands when they crash into lighted high-rise buildings at night. This week a volunteer with the New York City Audubon found more than three hundred bird carcasses littering sidewalks outside the World Trade Center.

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Sequoia National Park in California has been closed and evacuations ordered because of the threat posed by the KNP Complex fire. As of Wednesday, the fire had scorched more than 7,000 acres.

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In an attempt to protect the ancient sequoias of the park, some of the oldest and largest trees in the world, firefighters are swathing their trunks in protective foil. Those being wrapped include the largest of the trees, the one called General Sherman. 

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A new study has found that the production of meat worldwide causes twice the pollution of plant-based food. The production of meat accounts for almost 60% of greenhouse gases from food production. 

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A traditional hunt of dolphins in the remote Faroe Islands has sparked outrage as nearly 1500 of the animals were killed in one day. Conservationists estimate that this was the largest single-day hunt in history. It was definitely the largest ever in Faroe Islands history.

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The future survival of Florida's manatees is far from certain. This has been the deadliest year on record for the species and scientists and conservationists are scrambling to prevent further disaster.

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A global study has found that smoke from wildfires is killing people in cities far from the source of the smoke. According to the findings, it causes more than 33,000 deaths per year in 43 countries.

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In an exceptional event possibly brought on by global warming, nine loggerhead sea turtle babies have hatched in the most northern spot ever recorded. They came from a clutch of 82 eggs that were laid on a beach on the northern Adriatic coast. 

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American parks are being incredibly overcrowded by visitors and all that human presence is reshaping and changing the parks themselves. Park officials say it is not sustainable.

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Some states are implementing a new strategy in attacking the problem of plastics in the environment: They are making corporations pay.

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What would the world be like without hummingbirds? Let's hope we never find out, but many species of the little birds are in serious trouble and danger of extinction.

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The glaciers on Mt. Shasta in California are melting and now the mountain is nearly snowless which is further contributing to the melt. It began losing a lot of its snow cover in midsummer this year which is unusual. It generally comes later in the year.

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Wetlands, depending on their placement, can help remove nutrient pollution that causes low oxygen dead zones in the sea. Just in case we needed another reason to protect wetlands.

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Killings of environmental advocates around the world reached a new high in 2020. Most of those killed were indigenous people or small-scale farmers defending their forests against extractive industries.

*~*~*~*

California's wild chinook salmon population is at grave risk, threatened by a combination of the effects of drought and human impediments.

*~*~*~*

Squirrels can be bold, athletic, aggressive, and sociable. In other words, they have a lot in common with humans, at least that is the finding of animal researchers at the University of California, Davis. Their study was published in this month's issue of "Animal Behavior." 

*~*~*~*

Scientists have studied the Chicxulub event for more than 40 years. The space rock that slammed into Earth there 66 million years ago terminated the age of dinosaurs and paved the way for a bountiful new world for mammals. But it did much more than that scientists say; it completely modified the geologic and biologic evolution of the planet.

*~*~*~*

Do species awareness days actually serve the purpose of helping the animals that are so designated? Research is finding that there are ways to make such days more effective.

*~*~*~*

A conservation program in Seattle is working to restore the pinto abalone, a native species that is in danger of extinction in the Salish Sea.

*~*~*~*

Harvard University announced this week that it would be ending all of its investments in fossil fuels. This represents a landmark victory for climate activists who have long lobbied major colleges and universities to do just that.

*~*~*~*

Margaret Renkl mourns the lack of butterflies in her garden this year but finds other things in Nature that make her particularly happy just now. One is the migration of birds.

A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins: A review

 

Paula Hawkins had a best seller with her 2015 thriller The Girl on the Train. That book featured a damaged female protagonist. Perhaps on the theory that more is better, her new thriller features not one but three damaged female protagonists. And all of them are suspects in a murder.

The murder victim is one Daniel Sutherland whose body is found on his scuzzy houseboat moored on Regent's Canal in London. He had been stabbed and blood is everywhere including on a set of keys lying near the body. His neighbor from the next houseboat over finds the body when she notices his door open when she is out. For whatever reason, she picks up the keys and takes them with her.

That neighbor is named Miriam and as the discoverer of the body, she is immediately on the police's radar as a potential murderer. As we get to know Miriam, we find that she actually had a tenuous connection to the family of the murdered young man but it is not a happy connection. She is full of resentment and a desire for revenge over a wrong that was done to her, one that has blighted her life. Miriam had written a book and she asked a local author to read it. Well, he read it all right, but he appropriated the plot for his own work which became a best seller. (For some reason, the purloined plot seems to be a very popular plot device for writers this year.) That local author was the murder victim's uncle by marriage.

His aunt is Carla who is our second damaged protagonist. She, too, is full of resentment and anger. Years earlier she had suffered a heart-rending family tragedy, one from which she has never been able to recover and which continues to haunt her every day. She and her husband, the author, are no longer together, and a few weeks earlier her sister, Daniel's mother, accidentally(?) fell down a flight of stairs and broke her neck. She died instantly. And now, Daniel. Eventually, we learn that Daniel and his mother were at the center of the tragedy that Carla endured. Has she had her revenge?

Finally, we have Laura Kilbride, a young woman with whom Daniel had a one-night stand. It was her keys that were found by his body, but, of course, the police don't know that because Miriam didn't turn them over. When Laura was a child, she suffered a terrible accident that has left her damaged both physically and psychologically. These problems reveal themselves through a serious limp and her aggressive outbursts, short-term memory lapses, poor impulse control, and inappropriate social behavior. She feels low (or no) self-worth. Truly, she is one messed-up young woman.

In spite of the tragedies that have damaged their lives, it is somehow difficult to work up much empathy for any of these women. They are all essentially self-serving and narcissistic. Hawkins' narrative leads the reader to suspect one of the flawed characters before taking us in a completely different direction that seems to lead to one of the others and I admit I did not really anticipate the plot twist that she had devised for us at the end. The message of that ending seems to be that trauma can unravel a person's life if it isn't confronted and allowed to heal. And the damage from it can finally manifest itself in strange ways. Such as murder.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars 

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day - September 2021

Happy September Bloom Day. I hope you and your garden are doing well as we soon head in to official autumn (or spring in the southern hemisphere). We had expected to be hit by Tropical Storm Nicholas this week but it mostly missed us to the east headed toward Louisiana which can't seem to catch a break from the storms. We got less than an inch of much-needed rain and a bit of wind. That was the extent of our "storm."

My garden appreciated the rain, but frankly, it is looking pretty ratty at the moment. This year has not been kind to it, bringing one weather disaster after another. So, instead of showing you much of the garden this month, I decided to do something a bit different. Over the last couple of months, my garden has been visited by scores of butterflies, and today, I'd like to show you some of them. (Full disclosure: Not all of these pictures have been taken recently but all of these species of butterflies have been in the garden this month and all of the flowers shown are presently in bloom.)

This is the Painted Lady butterfly on purple lantana.

And this is a separate species, the American Painted Lady although you may not be able to tell the difference in these photos. If I had a ventral shot of this one, you would see that it has two large eyespots on the underside of its hindwing which distinguish it. 

Red Admiral sunning itself.

Fiery Skipper on purple lantana.

Dorantes Skipper on purple lantana.

Tropical Checkered Skipper on that ever-popular purple lantana.

 

Funereal Duskywing on allium.

You can't properly see its long snout here, but this is a Snout butterfly grabbing a meal from a hummingbird feeder.

Dainty Sulphur on wedelia.

Dog Face Sulphur on hamelia.

Sulphur butterfly on blue plumbago. I'm not entirely sure which sulphur this is - Large Orange, maybe? Feel free to contradict me if you know better.

Monarchs have been very scarce in the garden this year and to my knowledge, I haven't had a single egg or caterpillar on my milkweed, but lately a few more are passing through. This one stopped to feast on the porterweed.

This is the other milkweed butterfly that regularly occurs here, the Queen.

Gray Hairstreak on almond verbena.

Tawny Emperor on red lantana.

Gulf Fritillary on jatropha.

Variegated Fritillary.

Black Swallowtail on lantana.

Pipevine Swallowtail on Anisacanthus wrightii. This one is easily identifiable by the seven large orange spots on its hindwing.

Giant Swallowtail on that same Anisacanthus.

And finally, a Common Buckeye on white mistflower.

I hope you've enjoyed my "butterfly tour" and that you will visit again soon. 

As always, thank you to Carol Michel of May Dreams Gardens for supporting this monthly meme.

Breathe by Joyce Carol Oates: A review

 

It's been years since I read a Joyce Carol Oates book. I'm not sure why really. Maybe I was intimidated by the last one I read. She can be an intimidating writer. But when I read about her newest one, I was intrigued and knew I had to read it. Breathe is about grief and about how it can disorient a person and upend their life.

Forty-eight-year-old Gerard McManus and his second wife 37-year-old Michaela have come to New Mexico to the Santa Tierra Institute for Advanced Research from their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts where Gerard had been a professor of the history of science at Harvard. He was invited to spend an eight-month residency at the Santa Tierra Institute and his wife found employment teaching a weekly memoir workshop at the University of New Mexico. It was to be an adventure for them, but it was an adventure that quickly went wrong when Gerard became ill. At first, it was thought to be nothing too serious but that diagnosis quickly changed and by the time we meet him at the Santa Tierra Cancer Center, he is already on his way out. Soon he is transferred to hospice care and Michaela's vigil begins.

The book is divided into two parts, "The Vigil" and "Post-Mortem." Gerard is the dominant presence in each of them as Michaela sees her own life as inconsequential in comparison to her husband's. After her husband's death and cremation, a representative of the institute suggests to her that she should go home to Cambridge but she refuses. She can't bring herself to leave the place where Gerard was last present. She feels him everywhere and she begins to see him everywhere.

Perhaps it isn't unusual for a grieving spouse to continue to feel her partner's presence but soon Michaela's distress leads to outright hallucinations. She imagines that she had tried to give bone marrow to save Gerard's life but the procedure was botched and she ends up paralyzed. She gets a voice mail message saying that it was all a terrible mistake; her husband hasn't really died even though at this point his body has already been cremated. She looks for him everywhere and frequently catches glimpses of him in a crowd. Meanwhile, she herself seems to be disappearing. When she looks in the mirror, parts of her face are missing and a section of her left arm begins to fade.

And what about Michaela in her grief? Does she have no friends or relatives who can comfort her? Clearly not. We learned at the beginning of the book that her parents had been dead for decades, although later on, it appears that they may not be dead at all, merely out of touch. Perhaps that is the same thing as far as Michaela is concerned. Apparently, she has no siblings or if she does, they are out of touch also. Gerard, though, did have adult children from his previous marriage and did not want them informed so that they could visit him as he lay dying. Michaela acceded to his wishes and even after his death, she delays in informing them. Obviously, this was not a close-knit, supportive family.  

Anyone who has ever lost someone they love can empathize with Michaela's situation up to a point. I reached my point about two-thirds of the way through the novel and then I began to lose patience with her. Everyone grieves differently obviously, but most people in the real world have to learn to deal with that and get on with their lives. Michaela, for whatever reason, is incapable of that. She is disoriented in regard to time. Her days pass with excruciating slowness, but at the same time, everything seems to happen very quickly. Her grief controls every aspect of her life. At some point, she begins to feel that Gerard is not the one who died; rather, she is.

Oates' meditation on grief reveals hidden meanings that will probably appear different to each reader based on their own experience of grief. It is an emotionally complicated novel about a woman who has lost her anchor in the real world and now exists only as a shadow in her new hallucinatory existence. Strong stuff. Typical of Oates.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars  

Poetry Sunday: Don't Hesitate by Mary Oliver

How about we share another Mary Oliver poem? After all, you can never have too many of those.

In this one, the poet seems to acknowledge that it is often hard to simply live in and enjoy the moment, perhaps because we are afraid it can't last. She urges us to give in to that moment and fully experience the joy. Although "much can never be redeemed, still, life has some possibility left."

Don't Hesitate

by Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

This week in birds - #467

 A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

The American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week is the Great-crested Flycatcher. This is a bird of the upper forest canopy, a cavity-nester whose persistent calls ring out throughout the summer around here before it returns to its winter home in southern Mexico, Central America, and Colombia.

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After the passage of Hurricane Ida, a Shell refinery in Louisiana has been spewing into the air black smoke from toxic chemicals it is trying to burn off. The storm disabled air quality tracking systems in the area, making the potential harm to public health difficult to gauge.

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The Biden administration announced this week that they would open tens of millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas exploration as a result of a court order. However, Earthjustice, a non-profit public interest organization, has now filed suit on behalf of four environmental groups to challenge the move. Their contention is that the environmental analysis behind the auction is flawed and violated federal law.

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On Wednesday, the administration announced a blueprint for having nearly half of the nation's electricity produced by solar power by mid-century. It is part of an ambitious plan to address climate change.

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A new analysis by the Washington Post of federal disaster declarations reveals that nearly one in three Americans live in a county that has been hit by a weather disaster in the last three months.

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This is the Lear's Macaw, a beautiful Brazilian bird once on the brink of extinction that has been brought back thanks to decades of efforts by Brazilian conservation groups. But now the bird is being threatened again by the development of a wind energy facility in its habitat. The plans have proceeded despite requests of international and local conservation groups to move the project.

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More than 200 top medical journals are warning that climate change is the greatest threat to global public health and they urge world leaders to take effective action to cut heat-trapping emissions.

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As residents were forced to evacuate around Lake Tahoe because of the Caldor wildfire local bears moved into the area, digging through trash cans and breaking into houses in search of food.

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After the devastation of the summer's weather events throughout the country, some lawmakers are hoping that this will improve the possibility of actually taking effective action to combat climate change.

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When you think of the Thames River, if you think of it at all, you probably do not imagine it with seals living on it, but in fact, since the river has been cleaned up a recent survey revealed 574 harbor seals and 685 gray seals living in the area. 

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The world congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature meeting in Marseille has adopted a motion calling for the ban of deep-sea mining. Scientists argued that the consequences for the ocean's ecosystem are unknown if deep-sea mining is permitted.

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Conservation groups are calling for additional protection for the endangered Greater Sage-Grouse and its habitat. They contend that the Bureau of Land Management's plans for withdrawing certain areas of that habitat from damaging mining are insufficient.

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The warming climate in Britain has attracted a boom in the population of dragonflies and damselflies. At least six new species have colonized the country in the last twenty-five years.

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Research has found that animals are "shapeshifting" in response to climate change. They are changing their physiology to adapt to a hotter climate, getting larger beaks, legs, and ears in order to better regulate body temperature.

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The Kea, a New Zealand parrot, is considered to be one of the most intelligent species of birds. A disabled parrot named Bruce is further evidence of that. Bruce is missing the top part of his beak but he has learned how to use pebbles in lieu of a beak in order to preen himself. 

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The activities of a low-carbon heat cooperative in Surrey have produced conditions that have encouraged a rare and declining species of butterfly, the wood white, to return to the area.

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Poor air quality can be just as fatal as hurricanes, and yet we have become so accustomed to it that we no longer treat it as a crisis. Meanwhile, it gets harder to breathe.

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Why do owls have such long legs? As you might expect, it is all the work of evolution to make them more effective at their jobs. 

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It is known that Black Vultures do sometimes attack living animals but reports of these attacks in the Mid-West seem to be increasing. Some bird experts, however, suspect the reports are overblown. 

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A new surveillance system that wildlife rescuers use to track trends in wildlife illness and death can also provide information to help keep humans healthy.

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A Great Blue Heron in New York has gained hero status there after he was photographed swallowing a New York nemesis, a large rat.

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One of my favorite memories from childhood is late summer afternoon as dusk came and the fireflies came out. All around me, the growing darkness twinkled with their lights. I don't see many fireflies these days but in the Great Smoky Mountains, not so far from where I grew up, they are something of a tourist attraction.  

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Finally, Audubon has ten fun facts about one of our favorite backyard birds, the Northern Mockingbird.

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura: A review

 

Katie Kitamura's new novel is definitely not plot-driven. It could be argued that nothing much happens in it, although that's only on the surface; underneath there is a lot going on. The story is character-driven, presented to us in the first person by an unnamed narrator. She is a narrator who is in some ways unreliable, not because she lies to us but because she only has access to fragments of the reality around her. We struggle along with her to interpret people and happenings and understand how they relate to her.

Although we don't know the narrator's name, we know quite a bit about her. We know that she is fairly young and single. She has recently come to The Hague in the Netherlands fleeing New York after the death of her father there. She is an experienced global traveler. Her mother lives in Singapore. Her passport is well-stamped with various destinations and she speaks several languages, but where is she actually from? Where is home? It's a question that is never really answered but she tells us that she has spent long stretches of her life in several different European cities and she finds that The Hague bears a "family resemblance" to them.

The narrator has come to The Hague to work as an interpreter at one of the international courts there. In her position, she often interprets for people who have been accused of heinous crimes. To do this, she finds she must get inside people's heads and translate not just their words but their tone. And to accomplish that, it is necessary to find within herself a source of empathy for the person she's interpreting, even those who are notorious criminals. Her superiors find her to be very good at her job.

Outside of work, she starts up a relationship with a man who is separated from his wife but still married. His wife and teenage children now live in Lisbon. As his affair with the narrator intensifies, he tells her that he is going to Lisbon to ask his wife to end their marriage and that he will be gone for a couple of weeks. He invites her to move into his more spacious apartment and stay while he is gone. She does so, anticipating that their relationship will move to a new level. He goes to Lisbon and after a few cryptic texts, he essentially disappears. Two weeks go by, three weeks go by and his absence and silence continue. After several weeks, she decides to move back to her own apartment.

Meanwhile, back at work, she has been assigned to interpret for a former West African president on trial for genocide, euphemistically referred to as ethnic cleansing, in his country. As she accepts this assignment, she meditates on the fact that most of the defendants before the court tend to be Black. The court primarily investigates crimes and arrests the accused in African countries, even though crimes against humanity are occurring right around the world. She is surprised to find that the former president is a very charismatic man and that he likes her. She finds a perverse sense of pleasure in his approval even as she is appalled by the acts of which he is accused.

This story makes clear that the translator's job is one of intimacy with the person for whom she or he is translating and intimacies of various kinds are a theme throughout this book. One usually thinks of the word in the context of sexual intimacy but that really isn't what is meant here; rather, it is that sense of getting inside another person's head, understanding what they are thinking in order to interpret their words and tones. It's all about understanding language, body language as well as words. Only with such intimacy can one accurately interpret the individual's entire persona. 

When I turned the last page on this book, I gave it four stars in my mind but that was eleven days ago and I've had plenty of time to reconsider. This is an absorbing and taut novel that is hard to put down. It explores a world that I have little knowledge of and yet it delivered an intimate exposition, one might say translation, of that world that gave me a clearer understanding of it and how it works. Like the narrator of the novel, perhaps I see only fragments of reality and don't have access to the entire context, but what I see allows me to better interpret events. That's quite a remarkable achievement by this author and is worthy of five stars.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wayward by Dana Spiotta: A review

 

"It was wrecked. It was hers." So thinks Sam Raymond about the derelict old house with good bones in a poor neighborhood in her hometown of Syracuse that she has bought on a whim. She might also think that about herself - her body and her life. She is fifty-two years old and beginning to experience the effects of the mid-life climacteric; the sleepless nights; the unexpected and embarrassing hot flashes; the sudden realization that she has become invisible to much of the population, that they no longer "see" her. This is making her question everything about her life.

Sam's life has been a comfortable one as a suburban housewife married to a successful if dull lawyer. They have a sexually active teenage daughter who is becoming distant and uncommunicative. Sam works part-time as a guide at one of the local tourist attractions. She has just learned that her mother is terminally ill. In the long wakeful hours of the night, as she contemplates her life as a daughter, wife, and mother and her new sense of mortality, she realizes that the life she has is no longer fulfilling and she decides to change it.

The events of this book take place after the 2016 election and the state of an unraveling nation also contributes to Sam's mid-life reckoning. She is appalled at the prevalence of misogyny that the election exposed. Her oblivious husband tells her she shouldn't take it personally.

When Sam first sets eyes on that run-down house in the run-down neighborhood, she has an epiphany. This is what she's been looking for. She will buy the house and restore it and by restoring it perhaps restore her life. She's in the fortunate position of being able to manage that financially and so that is what she does; she buys the house, leaves her family home, and moves into it to work at the restoration.

But this is not the only change that Sam makes to her life. She seeks community with other women in her position and looks for ways to resist what she sees happening to her country. She makes new friends, some of whom she meets through a Facebook group called "Hardcore Hags, Harridans and Harpies." (I want to join that group!) She tries to become a part of her new neighborhood and the diversity of people who live there. She has stumbles and encounters problems and setbacks but as she makes progress on the house, she feels that she is making progress on her life.

If I'm making all of this sound a bit morbid and maudlin, be assured it really isn't. It is a funny - sometimes laugh-out-loud funny - story of one woman's transition through this unavoidable phase of a woman's long life. I found it thoroughly engrossing, perhaps because I identified completely with Sam. (Been there, done that. Didn't buy the wreck of a house to restore but did do other things to change aspects of my life, including starting a blog.) Dana Spiotta's writing is sharp and moving, as when she describes Sam's remembered pleasure at holding her daughter as a baby and her longing for that now as her daughter becomes more distant from her. Her ability to invoke and fully describe such feelings is an unadulterated pleasure to read.    

It's a lot to cover: the life of a wife, mother, and daughter in middle age and her disenchantment with the consequences of choices made; disenchantment with life, in general, made more intense by political, social, and cultural issues. But ultimately what Dana Spiotta's book serves to remind us is that there can be beauty in ruins.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars  

Poetry Sunday: On Children by Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran was a Lebanese-American writer and visual artist. He is known for writing very philosophical works, although he himself rejected the title of philosopher. His most famous work probably is The Prophet which is one of the best-selling books of all time and has been translated into more than 100 different languages. This is one of his more well-known poems. It speaks to what it means to be a parent.

On Children

by Kahlil Gibran - 1883-1931

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

This week in birds - #466

 A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

One of my very favorite winter visitors is the dainty little Chipping Sparrow, cutest of all the sparrows in my opinion. The chippie is the American Bird Conservancy's "Bird of the Week" and the good news about this bird of open forests, shrubby understories, and human-altered landscapes is that its population is in good shape. Its numbers are actually increasing. 

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The big environmental news in this country this week was, of course, Hurricane Ida. At the end of the week, the full extent of the damage done by the big storm in Louisiana could still not be assessed. Some places were still inaccessible and some people were still without electricity. What was clear was that the hurricane was made much, much worse by the effects of climate change. 

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As the storm worked its way toward the northeast, it created devastation over a large swath of the country but the New York and New Jersey area seemed to get the very worst of it accompanied by a significant loss of life. At the week's end, the final toll of deaths was still uncertain. 

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Like other information about the storm, the amount of environmental damage that it created cannot yet be fully determined. There were reports of an oil slick around at least one oil rig in the Gulf after the storm passed.

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And on the West Coast, the big problem is still the raging wildfires, particularly the Caldor Fire in California which threatened the Lake Tahoe area resulting in massive evacuations.

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Museum collectors surveyed the avian fauna of Colombia a hundred years ago. Now modern researchers are investigating how much of it remains in what was once an "ocean of forest" but has been significantly altered by humans over the past century.

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Spotted skunk doing a handstand.

Most of us are probably familiar with the striped skunk, but did you know that it has a very acrobatic spotted cousin?

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Citizen science data from sites like eBird are helping scientists to learn more about three alpine ptarmigan species, the Willow Ptarmigan, Rock Ptarmigan, and White-tailed Ptarmigan. All three are being stressed by increasing temperatures in their habitats in British Columbia.

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The Revelator's species spotlight this week feature's Baird's tapir, an endangered mammal that is related to rhinos and horses and has an elephant-like nose. It is called the "gardener of the forest" and is a valuable ally in the fight against climate change.

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An alarming new global study has found that up to one-half of the world's wild tree species could be at risk of extinction. The researchers call for urgent action to prevent an ecosystem collapse.

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Tiny tracking devices that can be carried by songbirds without damaging the birds have been an important advancement in avian research in recent years. Now, these devices are being used to track a threatened species of the coniferous forests of Canada, the Bicknell's Thrush. Researchers hope to be able to unravel some of the mysteries of this secretive little bird.

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The previous administration had imposed an environmental rule that allowed fertilizers, pesticides, and industrial chemicals to flow into small streams, marshes, and wetlands. This week, a federal judge in Arizona struck down that rule citing "fundamental, substantive flaws" in the policy that could cause "serious environmental harm." 

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The mysterious deaths of a family and their dog while hiking in the Sierra National Forest last month remain a mystery. Authorities have not been able to determine the cause of the deaths but the suspicion is that it is related to the environment and the Forest Service has closed trails and recreation sites in the area where the bodies were found while the investigation proceeds. 

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Mississippi Kites are currently passing through Texas on the way to their winter homes in South America. One of my fellow Texas bloggers in Austin was lucky enough to be visited by a large flock of the birds this week. 

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The death of a year-old humpback whale calf in the waters of the Stellwagen Bank national marine sanctuary was a tragedy for the whales but presented a smorgasbord for predators including eight great white sharks that were documented feeding on the carcass.

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The bird formerly called McCown's Longspur has been renamed as the Thick-billed Longspur because the naturalist for whom it was originally named had an unsavory history. The bird, which is increasingly hard to find, is an iconic species of the Canadian prairie.

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Some of the smaller mammals that are endangered frequently get overlooked as we focus our attention on the more charismatic species. But these little guys, like mice and voles, are essential parts of their native ecosystems and their loss would threaten the continued survival of those systems. 

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Solar energy is helping to clean up the historic Aztec-era canals of Mexico City. Mexican scientists have developed a "nanobubble" system based on solar energy that improves the water quality in the canals.

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The "Southern Blob" is a region in the southwest Pacific Ocean that is about the size of Australia and contains unusually warm water. The Blob is contributing to megadrought in South America's coastal region including Chile, Argentina, and parts of the Andes Mountains.  

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Finally, here's an article about "links from the brink" that includes both good and bad news and offers some advice on reversing the "insect apocalypse."