Gredos – Page 19 – don't confuse the narrator

bisy; backson

Like Christopher Robin, I have been “BISY” and there haven’t been as many updates to the blog recently as I’d have liked.

I found this feather while walking to the village the other day. I assume it’s a woodpecker feather, though I suppose it could belong to a hoopoe – we certainly see the abubilla more often than the pájaro carpintero, which I hear sometimes but catch sight of only on very rare occasions.

The feather markings made me think of the Spotted or Herbaceous Backson, although, of course, the Backson isn’t the only mythical beast that is spotted.
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moving mountains

After the storm,
the river drops to reveal
new mudbanks;
slowly, the mountains
are coming to us.

(No, there are no mudbanks visible in the photo, which is actually the point at which my local river is dammed to form a reservoir. But hopefully it brightens the page a bit.)

blame the reds

We’re still having intermittent internet and phone outages, and still waiting for them to change the poste at the end of the garden – which is riddled with woodworm and carpenter bee tunnels – and, hopefully, install a new cable at the same time.

This morning, having glimpsed a red squirrel run across the road ahead of me, I was reminded that last time we had problems, the telecom guy blamed las ardillas. He re-strung several lengths of cable before we realised that in fact someone had cut through the cable while trying to tidy up the excess ivy. (However much I complain about the telephone company, I’ll admit they were more than reasonable when they didn’t charge us for that.)
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following a star

Not quite as glorious as the marigolds, but another picture to brighten the page:

I think I’ve mentioned before that I learn things from posting on this blog. I’ve been looking at these dead plant heads for weeks (and in previous years, too) and although I’ve vaguely wondered what they are, I’ve never bothered to investigate. All I thought when I took the picture was that they were like stars against the evening sky.
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marigolds

Simply because the page is looking rather drab and I think these are absolutely glorious:

Of course, they aren’t the wild caléndulas that sprout up all over the grass in spring when we aren’t looking; these (growing in a flower border down by the piscina natural) are so startlingly vivid that I am tempted to think about planting some.