A Gallery from the card

Like our back yard, the shots stored on my memory cards get to be a mess if they're not tended--all of kinds of stuff gets mixed up. It's time I pick some weeds to see what's there.

Like this--a rather immodest sempervivum (I read that off the tag--"hens and chicks" for us non-Latinites) suddenly grew a stem that seemed embarrassingly phallic, then--of all things--that strange stiff appendage sprouted blossoms still blooming today.

Not only that, but when all that fuss was examined by a close-up lens, what turned up was nothing less than a birthday cake. My wife's birthday was last Sunday (sorry, no pics). If I'd only have known, I could have put one on the cake I didn't make or buy.

But who knew that within that little flower a full-blown birthday cake, complete with candles, sat gloriously lit.

This is a cottonwood or a mountain aspen. I'm no expert. But it's growing like a weed in a flower bed out back. I really should pull it but I can't. We don't have many trees to start with (we love our open view of prairie), and this thing is more of a grassland native than I ever will be. It deserves to live, don't you think?

Someday it could be a monster, like this one.

Someday this ancient gnarled veteran will be back, illustration for an essay not yet written.

Here's something iconic. Love the shot. This is a Great Plains portrait--wind and wire and endless grass, and at the heart of it the abandoned steps of an old country church.

Barbara told me there was a night sky I shouldn't miss--this one. We've had more than our share of incredible skies lately--morning, noon, and night; but few beg a story like this one: three characters. Why, I don't know, but the one on the left seems a woman or girl standing. Then there's something or someone like Java the Hut, tended by a less forbidding serf behind her or him or it. Don't like the story? Create your own.

This magnificent hardwood stands on a small Oklahoma Ranch and is tended by the Angus you see presently leaving its immense shadows. Isn't it amazing?--a tree's tree.

Stumbled on this a week or so ago, when a road was flooded and I needed to cross the Big Sioux farther south. Always wondered where Giants in the Earth was set--exactly, had to be around here somewhere. There will be a Small Wonder about this one sooner or later.

I visited Greenwood, SD many times but never found Struck by the Ree's gravesite, which lots of travel books said was really something. It is. Here's where the old man was buried. Myth has it that Lewis and Clark took him in their arms when he was brought to them, a newborn. They wrapped him in an American flag and proclaimed this baby would be a peacemaker, which he was. Read the inscription.

This morning, as I type, the morning sky is hazy from all the moisture, daily rain. But it's also clear, which is unusual this summer. We've been treated to some incredible skies as of late, some monstrously beautiful, others just plain scary. 

An old planter meant to hold a crowd of flowers every summer. This summer--none. Off to the right is the remains of a home picked up and moved a half hour away. What's left is the foundation and some riff-raff, a wreck. I took a picture or two, but it's too painful to show, even here. They were neighbors, the two of them, grandparents. Several years ago, he became a victim of early onset Alzheimer's. Mercifully, he left this vale of tears a couple months ago already. Some stories hurt so bad that it's tough to go there. This is only their old front yard, a planter that always held living color.

For some reason, they wouldn't miss it for the world--strawberry day, which includes a trip to the fields, where the three of them (and me) pick a couple of flats' worth. This year they were thick as apples, tons of them. Then we come home, where the grandsons pluck 'em and Barb cooks up souffle and strawberry soup--and a whole bunch of strawberry muffins. Strawberry Day has become, blessedly, a tradition.

Drives me plain nuts to have to watch 50 high school kids at a place like this--an overlook along the Badlands loop, where we end up every July when I accompany a church youth group on an excursion into the reservations of South Dakota. So much bad could happen, and I'm getting so dark old. I can't handle it. 

But let me just end with a dawn, a spiritual place to stop--and begin.

Shot just last week from our back porch.