nature – Page 32 – don't confuse the narrator

midsummer madness

The last two posts have mentioned the noche de San Juan, when celebratory bonfires are lit, but I had rather thought that that would be enough of the subject for this year. After all, the hogueras are lit on the evening of June 23rd, and today they should all be over.

Sadly, though, someone seems to have got the dates mixed and started un incendio in the middle of the day today.

The whole afternoon has been accompanied by the screaming sirens of the police and fire brigade, and the thrumming of the helicopters called out to deal with it.
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at the western edge of Europe…

palm fronds prick at a volcanic sky
and bright hibiscus
leer at pink-skinned foreigners.

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the way through the fields

I was away for less than a fortnight, but the elderly neighbour has been ill and hasn’t been around with his donkey for a few weeks now.

It seems, then, that the path I take across the field to get onto the road to the village has been ‘repossessed’. (It used to stretch from where the photo was taken almost to the tree and then down to the right.)

I should probably write a poem about it, but I think Rudyard Kipling dealt with the same subject better than I ever will, even if he was writing about woods rather than fields:
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a visitor

Yesterday I started to worry at a draft poem that I found in my notebook. It was started a year ago and is provisionally called Monsters.

The appearance of the creature in the photo on my verandah today was entirely fortuitous.

That picture doesn’t give much idea of scale, but if you click you’ll see her full length. She was a good two tiles long and they are 24 cm across. (So, allowing for the ripples, I suppose she was around 18 inches from nose to tail tip.)*
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ephemera

Along the bridle path
brief worlds
flower and fade

The words are really only an excuse to post the photo. Sadly, even if you click the picture to enlarge it, it isn’t clear that the ‘dandelion’ globe was around three inches in diameter (approximately 8 cm).

I had to make do with my phone camera yesterday and of course by the time I’d re-charged my camera and went out this morning, there was nothing left. Perhaps I’ll catch the other bud at the right moment.