Ate breakfast on the porch this morning. I have found a new delicious bagel, Blooming Berries. So delish! Penelope whined the whole time I was enjoying my breakfast but I didn’t share with her. Did give her a piece of cantaloupe. She loves that and she went back to bird watching after she wolfed it. Honestly, she couldn’t have tasted it.

Mother Nature blew up another few storms today. She’s really cutting into my porch pondering time. Brought the swing cushions back from the porch to the house three times today. The sky was a beautiful dark blue this morning, full of white clouds all kissed brightly by the sunshine on their fluffy cotton ball tops. The clouds were quickly bulging with gathering rain and moving swiftly on their journey.

The feeders were full of cardinals and finches and titmice late afternoon. The downy woodpeckers were enjoying the suet baskets. They all had a refreshing shower in the rain. I watched the birds on the feeders during the rain storm. They were seemingly oblivious of the rain, eating sunflower seeds and shaking the water droplets from their wing feathers. I know it felt good to them, cooling down after the humid hot morning. Two cardinals sat on the handles of my old wheelbarrow full of millions bells. So pretty, but of course they flew off right as I took the photograph.

The juvenile cardinals are so handsome this time of year, dressed in their fluffy downy feathered vests of orange and red and their tweed coats in hues of brown and black. I sat close to the feeders and watched the young cardinals for a long time. They’d occasionally perch on the bannister and watch me, too.

Some of the people at Russell used to tease Chief about his unruly hair. They’d laugh and tell me he never combed it till he met me. Anyway, this little cardinal came by several times and his feather comb on top of his head needed combing. Every feather was messy and turned a different way. Made me think of Chief.

I sat outside at dusk and watched the golden glow of the sun as she set on the turquoise line of the horizon. She was busy painting with her pinks and purples in the stillness of twilight. As I looked down the street, it seems she was painting the air with a faint pink hue. There was a glow on the bricks and clapboards of the houses on the street. I love this time of day when the sun lays her head down for the night and darkness comes to cover the earth and Father Sky adds a few twinkles to illuminate the dark night. Another day put to bed with the promise of a new day on the horizon.

When the cicadas started singing at twilight I remembered something I had read — copperhead snakes consider cicadas a delicacy. The snakes climb trees, hide out on limbs, and clamber around the trunks of trees where the cicadas are singing. We better all watch for them. I am always looking for my resident king snake, Balthazar, and I hope he doesn’t have any copperhead cousins.

When the thunder and wind ran me and Penelope back in the house around lunch, I watched the storm push the bamboos around in their skinny man dances. I could hear the wind chime symphony keeping time with the soft muffled crackling of the bamboo branches. Decided it would be a good time to reading chair sit so I picked up Gone with the Wind and started reading the novel for the ninth time. Always see something different every time I read it. Don’t know how I read this in the sixth grade but I remember checking it out and riding home on my bicycle to sit in the swing and start reading. Hadn’t gotten my unicycle yet. I do remember the library assistant calling my mother to give permission for me to check out the book. It was in the adult section, heaven forbid!

Margaret Mitchell really has a way with words. She grew up in a bright red Victorian house with yellow trim so I imagine color was a part of her life. I was reading her description of dusk and realized she must have often watched the sun set. She describes it so beautifully — “The sun was now below the horizon and the red glow at the rim of the world faded into pink. The sky above turned slowly from azure to the delicate blue-green of a robin’s egg and the unearthly stillness of rural twilight came stealthily down around her.” She captured it perfectly. I love her descriptions of the earth. She must have had a love of the land as her Scarlett did. Mitchell’s description of the freshly plowed cotton fields is a work of art, too. “The moist hungry earth, waiting up turned for the cotton seeds, showed pinkish on the sandy tops of furrows, vermillion and scarlet and maroon where shadows lay along the trenches.” You can see Mother Earth in her words.

The English language has over 750,000 words, don’t know how that was calculated, but we’re fortunate we can color our writing with descriptive words that paint a picture for the reader. I’ve always loved words and loved reading and I’m mindful of how hard it is to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboards, and express what’s in your mind and heart.

We read a book and put it back on the shelf, place it on the floor by our reading chair, or donate it to the Goodwill Store. We look at a newspaper for a while, then we throw it away, or put it the bottom of our bird cages, or ball it up to start a fire in the fireplace. We never think about all the time and effort that goes into writing a book or publishing a publication. The stories have to be written, the photographs have to be taken, the stories and photos transferred to the layout of the pages, the pages sent to the printers, the pages folded, sometimes inserted, so many more steps in the process. I’ve worked this life and I understand and appreciate the efforts that go into publishing the written word. I hope we never lose the need to feel the weight of a book or newspaper in our hands.

“A book is a gift you can open again and again,” — Garrison Keillor