a week ago i saw my first fawn of the season, a singleton (as far as i know) following mum across a big hay meadow.

yesterday a saw a bald eagle eating where turkey vultures have been scavenging by the stream where there is a dead raccoon.

smallish bald eagle, unusual on our creek

the days trudge by, pandemic, crazy president, racism called out in strength and honesty maybe? finally? our earth in so much pain. here it’s a sense of business as usual, the first fawn to the season, a bald eagle visits a raccoon carcass, old slapped together shed says look at me. i’m still trying to get some things accomplished. except, where was i on my income taxes? and where are the ideas that i forgot to write down? and where is this place i call home heading to in this current crisis?

boco printed linen, ochre pigmented flax paper

i go to town and make stuff, bring stuff home, spread it out and look. think. wonder. what is all this?

i give my heart to turtles, i give my hope to them, too. at this spot on my one-mile-long dirt road is the only one i’ve seen this year. but she made it. i have been by since, not seen evidence of excavation by those pesky raccoons. everybody eats somebody. there’s no such thing as free lunch.

i gardened maybe two and a half hours yesterday, pulling weeds, planting, harvesting bedstraw (do you know if our lady’s bedstraw is the same as the english cleavers?) for a later printing, digging up narcissi before they disappear to replant elsewhere and planning the planting site. a lot of replanting elsewhere. no place to plant indigo this year, there are so many onions and other edible plants, mostly inside the fenced in garden. because of raccoons and deer and all the other hungry ones. there are metaphors and teachers everywhere, if we pay attention.

two buckets of flax pulp await me, and here i am, writing a blog post and emailing friends. and my energy fails. this is what this pandemic is like, a great big cloth muffling me into befuddlement. at home little one waits.

she’s still a hard pup, strong willed, pesky, into everything, but she is smart. we’re ok here, i hope you are too.