Loose Leaf Notes

1. This week’s shopping list literally started with “fizzy and “izze.”

2. Fizzy is packets for Emergen-C powder and Izze is a brand of juice soda that I like.

3. Someone at the weekend’s Mayfaire wanted to sell me a beer cozy.  “I’m the type of person who gardens with my hands without gloves. I’m not about to take the time to put a cozy on my beer,” I told her.

4. Unlike my not-shy Clark Gable cardinal, the red-breasted grosbeaks in my yard are averse to posing, so I have only been able to photograph them through a glass window.

5. You can’t even spot me / walking to the mailbox / Like a bird losing habitat / I sing less and listen more / – From Truancy HERE.

6. Three’s a charm or three strikes you’re out?

7. Is crude a mutant plural of rude?

8. The best band I didn’t dance to and other May Day Firsts HERE.

9. So I was trying to photograph the grosbeaks through a cracked open window and only later when I uploaded the pictures on my computer later did I discover that there was an indigo bunting nearby, aka by me as “the bluebird of happiness” (see the final picture here).

10. We recently had our own Julia Butterflies who lived in trees for a month in protest of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a. a 300-mile, $3.5 billion gas pipeline tearing through rural land. They were just up the road protesting on their own property as chainsaws waited, because, as reported in the Washington Post “…To them, the pipeline seems like a violation because it doesn’t appear to yield local benefits… The protesters are trying to draw attention not only to the trees that are being cleared but also to the water so evident around the pipeline route… Water from Bent Mountain flows into the Roanoke River, which provides drinking water to the whole region…”

11. It was a mother and daughter whose land was being taken by eminent domain. The mother’s name was “Red” Terry and she had support from many followers who started a campaign called “Stand with Red.”  Here’s Red’s statement, as reported by the Washington Post after a court order and proposed fines prompted her to come down: “We have brought national attention to this, and that was amazing,” she said. “Now that we’re on the ground we have the ability to continue this battle — by no stretch of the imagination are we giving up.” Theresa “Red” Terry, 61, and her daughter, Theresa Minor Terry, 30, had perched on platforms in trees on the family’s Bent Mountain property since April 2 to protest construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

12. I’m my father’s homebody / and my mother’s skeptic / floating through days / like a ghost squeaking floorboards / Eating chocolate before lunch / and scrubbing burnt pans / At night I pray for dreams / and sleep out on a limb … read my poem Truancy in its entirety HERE.

13. Red finch doesn’t flinch. See the movie HERE.

__________Thirteen Thursday