Hummingbirds at the feeder at Coyote Lodge, our place in New Mexico. Bill says that there are often as many as 30-40 hovering around, mostly rufous, ruby-throats, and black-chinned (but there are quite a few listed on the New Mexico bird list, and I haven't been able to study them yet). He's busy brewing hummingbird hootch when he isn't working on his log preservation project, or watching it rain. (Yes, it's raining there, too. Lots. And lots. Very wet.) He has time for fun stuff like that, since he isn't writing a book. Or blogging.
Son Michael has posted another of his monthly essays about life as a stay-home dad, written for the Juneau Empire. I'm hoping that seeing his writing in print will encourage him to do more of it--especially when his column is featured in the newspaper banner. That's what every writer needs: a boost now and then. That's one reason I love blogs. They give the writer a public space to fill and maybe even help him/her develop the discipline it takes to fill that space with enough interesting material, often enough to develop an audience. Sometimes this even leads to a book, like the memoir Julie and Julia, which grew out of a blog. Or No Impact Man, which is going to be a book and a documentary movie.
And then there are books, such as What Wildness is This, that become blogs. Which brings me to the two new posts in our What Wildness blog. Check them out. Linda Joy Myers writes that Texas tastes like Oklahoma (I don't doubt it--the wind blows from that direction) and Paula Yost writes an hysterically funny piece that ends with a naked wild wet woman in a cold shower at rain-soaked Beavers Bend State Park in Oklahoma. (What is it about OK, gals?) Oh, and Paula has posted a seriously beautiful photo of a clump of golden mushrooms, also naked and wild and wet.
Reading note: What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left. O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.--Gerard Manley Hopkins