Day 156

Middle School Hawaiian Dance

Snapshots from two days

The Dance
Slow music.  Short boys and tall girls (all the same age) are attracted like magnets - music ends and they drift apart, the magnets turned around to repel, released by the end of a song.

Giggling girls tell stories about boys, their heads close, like a bunch of flowers tied together.

Some kids completely at ease in their new bodies, moving to the music, excited with the thrill of it all.  Others lost, drowning in this rousing, scary environment of the dance floor.

The View from the Deck
A grackle carefully extracts a peanut shell from the feeder, flies down to the birdbath, where it deposits the shell in the water, has a few drinks, then carefully bobs the peanut up and down a few times, like a rusk in coffee, until it is saturated and opens easily with a few jabs of the beak, holding the soggy peanut in its claws.  The extracted peanut also gets dunked and then eagerly munched down (in as much as a beak can munch something down). 

Miscellaneous
Raccoons also like to wash their food.  This morning there is a dead raccoon at the side of the road near the house, driving by is a shocking experience each time, the maimed body, teeth in a last snarl of fear and pain. 

The Meadow

Morning meadow of beauty, wildflowers, butterflies, the first dragonflies of the season, and the wonderful discovery of a bumblebee nest in a cinderblock in the middle of the meadow, ringed by all these vast intersecting circles of life, a veritable flurry of Venn diagrams, a vast garden. 

Afternoon meadow walk to check on bumblebee nest, to find devastation, the field has been ploughed, everything bowed down, broken, buried!  A white-tailed deer walks aimlessly along the edge of the fractured earth.  Bumblebees searching for their lost queen, their little society. 

A weeping woman who loves this meadow with great passion, armed with a wheelbarrow and spade, kneels in the rich brown soil, trying to pull upright and save some of what has been ploughed under, daisies still peeping out with their strong white faces, celandine blurred yellow, milkweed withering already.