Late summer in Indiana, and the evening air is buzzing with insect song. And the prairie plantings are full of wings -- butterflies and dragonflies and more. I only just now noticed the little grasshopper below the swallowtail in the photo above!
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Back home again in Indiana, we're speeding through August. It's a colorful month. abuzz with bees, butterflies and dragonflies. And the sound of cicadas and crickets rasping at dusk.
One evening a herd of elk wandered through the back yard. And it was high season for roadside flowers.
My kids used to sing the Arrogant Worms song Rocks and Trees, in celebration of their Canadian heritage. And in Canmore we saw some of the rocks and trees and trees and rocks, and water. Also small wonders -- butterflies and wild flowers.
On the road in Alberta, from Edmonton to Canmore (just east of Banff) -- city towers in the distance, big sky, long prairie expanses, chartreuse canola fields, mountains across the meadows, sun and shadow on the Rockies.
Visiting with family in Alberta, we had a lovely day for visiting the Aga Khan Garden in the University of Edmonton Botanical Gardens. It combines water features and geometric designs with Alberta skies and flora. And then there are the small whimsical brass amphibians scattered around the main fountain... Back in Goshen, the summer is in full swing. Coneflowers, beebalm, and Queen Anne's Lace are blooming, and I found my first monarch caterpillar on the milkweed in my garden. Dragonflies and dewdrops abound.
MennoCon 2019, in Kansas City, early July. The view from the top -- my hotel room was on the top floor, overlooking the plaza and the convention city. Cloud displays, 4th of July airshow jets practicing (six of them in tight formation), and fittingly, a double rainbow over the convention center.
If not raining, most mornings lately have at least been moist. I don't recall seeing this sort of beading of water droplets on morning glories before, but I found it again this morning. These are early bloomers, so perhaps other years the mornings weren't so damp when the morning glories started blooming. Raindrops on roses and delphinium and serviceberries, also known as saskatoons. They are ripening now and we picked a quart. In the prairie plantings, coneflowers are starting to open.
The prairie plantings on campus are starting to bloom and one of the first flowers to open this year was the spiderwort. Here are six variations on the theme -- and one baby grasshopper of the many that hopped away as I stepped through knee-high plants to get closer to the spiderwort. (Actually there are three in the last photo, but only one that's in focus.)
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My approach to contemplative photography --
"Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." Mary Oliver in "Sometimes" Archives
August 2020
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