Yellow Lady Slipper (Bucket List item for both of us)

We have always wanted to see Lady Slippers but expected to see them 

in some ferny glen, not next to a gravel lane amid alkali sloughs 
while we were looking for shorebirds. But Helen spotted them there. 
Laying on the ground for the photo did result in me finding a tick later,
but it had not bitten me and now the answer is at hand. 

Please see the last photo.

"I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?"

from At Blackwater Pond

by Mary Oliver

Having hauled me to the Shellbrook Medical Clinic

for infected tick bites two years running, Helen got me

 an anti-tick outfit, because she is a wonderful person. 

Tick Tock

“Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?”

Another summer another round of antibiotics. But enough about the ticks, time for some Tock, so I have pulled out the philosophy text by which I mean to organize my life.



“For instance," said the boy again, "if Christmas trees were people and people were Christmas trees, we'd all be chopped down, put up in the living room, and covered in tinsel, while the trees opened our presents."
"What does that have to do with it?" asked Milo.
"Nothing at all," he answered, "but it's an interesting possibility, don't you think?”

Because life is about possibilities, isn't it?



“The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what's in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that.”

Trip to the cabin

"As I sit for a while after breakfast

reading a few pages

with a shadowing sense

that I am stealing the moment

from something else

that I ought to be doing

so the pleasure of stealing is part of it"

from Theft of Morning

W.S. Merwin

Our trip was good, the south is very dry however, before Kindersley we saw a white dust devil from one of the salt flats. It rained between Kindersley and Bigger which was a blessing, The young lady at the hotel told me it was the first rain they had had this spring after not much snow. The cabin came thru the winter in great shape, no mice got in. We have seen lots of ducks and I have been able to get some nice photos, a real contrast with last year when my cataracts were so bad. I have already found three ticks, one on Whateley and two on me so I will have to use lots of bug spray and keep after the grass. I am also getting a haircut.