Peekaboo

I stayed with friends in Woodinville during the six weeks when my balance and dizziness problems were at their worst. Other friends who lived nearby brought meals for me. (Now that I’m back in my Seattle home, one friend is staying with me, and my neighbors are bringing me dinners so that I can have some transition time.) It is wonderful to have the support of so many people.

There are deer in the place I stayed in Woodinville. After I had been there for awhile, I started walking between the house and the front gate. At first, I only made it a third of the way to the gate. On the day before I left, I walked the “round trip” four times in the morning and 2 or 3 times in the evening! And I had cut my time down from 10 minutes per round to 6 minutes.

One day when I was walking, I spotted a deer.

When she saw me, she came closer. She would peek out at me in-between the trees that lined the road. Usually by the time I could get my phone ready to take a photo, she would be looking a different direction. Then she would dart away, only to show up a bit down the road. It felt like a game of peekaboo.

I cropped the photo above two times.

Once the doe reached the part of the road between the front gate and the house where there is no fencing, she ran away. I didn’t see her again that day. But what fun it had been… hopefully for both of us.

PNW GreenFriends Newsletter: August 2020

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Enjoy!

PNW GreenFriends Newsletter: July 2020

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This may be my favorite issue!
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Gigantic Rhubarb

A few days ago a neighbor asked if I wanted some rhubarb from her garden. I enthusiastically said “Yes”!

She put the rhubarb on my porch and let me know it was there. I was astounded by how big the leaves were.

I put a nickel on one of the leaves to give you a better sense of its size.

I wonder if the leaves are this big because the air quality in the city is so much better since there is decreased traffic due to the stay at home orders. Everything in nature seems more healthy and more beautiful this year.

PNW GreenFriends Newsletter: June 2020

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Beauty in My Yard: May 2020

FOTD

The Absence of Plastic

Towards the end of January in 2017, I cleaned out the three birdhouses in my back yard. They all had nests inside but I noticed that none of them had been used; one was barely begun and another I judged to be abnormal.

the 3 bird nests

The one I considered abnormal had practically filled the whole bird house. The top of it was flat and solid, there was no place for a mother bird to lay or sit on her eggs. Like the others, that birdhouse was made of many natural materials, but it also included many small pieces of plastic.

I ended up taking that bird nest apart. I soon discovered it contained a tremendous amount of plastic. Below you will see a photo of the plastic that I found in that one nest.

I wondered if the bird’s brain had been poisoned by the plastic and if that was why the top was flat. My heart ached when I thought about the many ways humans contaminate nature.

This experience occurred soon after we started working on restoring the Greenbelt property that is adjacent to my house. The land at that time was full of trash, big and small, and there were a lot of small plastic pieces in and on top of the ground.

It was near nesting season, so we decided to invite the Bala Kendra group from our Amma satsang to do a Greenbelt litter pickup work party. It was amazing to see how much trash the children gathered in an hour’s time.

In the years since then, numerous truckloads of garbage have been removed from the property.

This year, when I cleaned out the bird houses in preparation for nesting season, I found that two of the houses were practically empty. Only one contained a complete nest. It didn’t look like it had been used, but at least it had been built normally; there was a cup indentation on top, a place for the mother bird to lay her eggs.

I didn’t take apart the nest this time but the absence of plastic was very noticeable. I only saw one small piece on the outside of the nest and another small piece at the bottom of the cup.

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You can read the full story about my 2017 experience in a three part series. It includes many more photos, some of them microscopic. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3