It was foggy this morning and I love a foggy morning. It was also not raining. I opened the front door and could hear birdsong. It wasn’t the sound of many, many birds like one hears in the spring, but one or two birds with the most glorious calls. I went outside, sat on the glider and just listened. The calls were loud and very musical and, since it was foggy, the cicadas hadn’t started up yet, so I could simply sit and listen.
Eventually, I went inside for my camera because it was so beautiful out there that I couldn’t resist.
I felt calmer and more at peace than I have in a while. It’s amazing and wondrous what fog and birdsong and the beauty of the landscape can do for one’s soul.
The light just beginning to hit the maple tree.
Pokeweed, which has self-seeded in front of the house. I don’t want it there next year, but I couldn’t pull it now. The birds love those berries.
I heard the honking of Canada Geese and got this picture of them flying through the fog.
I saw a little bird fly onto a maple branch so I got up and moved closer. He, too, was singing a beautiful song, a song that seemed too powerful to come from that little body.
I managed to get this photo:
I love seeing that tiny bird in the midst of all the leaves and the lichen-covered branches, with the fog in the background. I was real happy with this shot.
A good way to start the day. To add to that, we were able to sit in the secret garden and have our second cup of coffee. We haven’t been able to do that for a while. Eventually, we had to come in as the mosquitoes are plentiful this year due to all the rain.
Today, I must mow. It’s supposed to get very, very hot this afternoon, so I’ll have to get to it this morning. And tomorrow morning. Because it’s going to rain again on Tuesday. Remember me saying that the rivers were alarmingly low? They’re full to the brim now. We can hear the rush of water from our front porch.
That’s a good thing.
Happy Sunday.
Happy to hear you’re getting a bit of a break from the rain and were able to enjoy your secret garden. Hope the mowing goes quickly!
Today we have no rain as well so we’ll be gardening as long as we can. Warmish temperatures expected but not hot. Tomorrow will be a scorcher so today is the day for the outside work.
Enjoy your day that has started out so nicely!
X Chy
I will! Thank you, Chy!
I love the spider web on the pokeweed. It looks so very delicate.
Hope you both have a lovely Sunday.
I love those spider webs – often, you can’t see them until the light hits them just the right way.
Glad you experienced those peaceful moments! Not many people would stop to appreciate them. We’re hosting “high tea” today for the friend who took care of our house and cats while we were in Europe. My daughter has been preparing and baking the past three days.
I hope the tea is a huge success!
so beautiful Claudia. in every way! thank you.
You’re welcome!
When I worked, I dreaded and really disliked mornings. Now, they are my favorite time of day. I love to sit in just silence and listen as a new awakening happens every single morning. We are lucky to be able to experience that pretty often in this time of life.
We are back to stifling humidity and heat. It is like walking into a wall out there. We worked in the yard most of yesterday morning, so I am glad we got some weeding, etc completed because I surely won’t be out there today!
Hope you continue to have a good day. Don’t overdo the mowing in this weather. Lots of water!! But, you know that. (My children just roll their eyes at me when I state the obvious over and over again.) Happy day to both of you.
My favorite time, as well. We both seem to be waking up at 5:30 am, like clockwork. But it gives me precious time in the morning so that’s good.
It’s unbelievably humid here today as well. And very hot. I mowed in spite of it but I am definitely tired.
Yeah….Chris is right…stifling! There were dark clouds this morning, and even thunder. Plus a green, orange and yellow mass on the radar headed our way. I thought, oh good…a thunderstorm. But…something happened….all we got were 7 drops of rain. What a disappointment.
I think we are going for a ride…need to get out of the city. Happy mowing! ;)
Same here. And more for tomorrow and then the usual thunderstorms and rain on Tuesday. I’m sorry you didn’t get that rain!
great start to a day! hope it continues that way for you!
kathy in iowa
Thanks, Kathy!
Glad you were able to be quiet & get “recharged” today. I love foggy mornings too. I grew up on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. The lake & our breakwall was only about 15 feet from the back of our house – and on foggy mornings we not only had all that spooky silent mist, but the foghorn at Charlotte Beach would sound, to warn ships & boaters. It didn’t stop until the fog lifted, which was sometimes a whole morning. I LOVED the plaintive sound of the foghorn. Very romantic. We’re due to get rain on Tues, Wed & Fri but we can still really use it up here. I hope we get what you all don’t need anymore. Peace.
#Resist
#Protect
I love the sound of foghorns, just like I love the sound of a mourning dove. Plaintive, in a minor key, haunting.
I love peaceful, contemplative, slow mornings like that.
I know you’ve had too much rain…we’re the total opposite here in IL. It’s dry as a bone. All the grass is brown and crispy. My tomato plants are doing terribly and are simply scrawny twigs. It’s in the 90’s and the only chance of rain we have coming is tomorrow and Tuesday where it says “scattered thunderstorms”. So we’ll either get nothing or a deluge. It’s a crapshoot.
I hope you get some rain, Melanie!
I’ve been trying to find some peaceful moments in this life right now.
Find the ones you can – even if it’s just a 5 minute pocket of peace.
I posted picture on Facebook this morning…saying a visit to the beach was “good for the soul”…great minds think alike! My husband fell off a ladder a few weeks ago and required surgery on his foot…he hasn’t been able to walk since. So we drive to the beach where he can sit on a bench and look out at the water. A change of scenery and an ocean breeze do wonders…
Thank you for all of your great blogs!
Oh how I long for an ocean breeze! I’m going to push for drive to the ocean, even if it takes several hours to get there.
Claudia, So glad you had a refreshing calm morning. I love that geese in the fog shot. I miss sitting outside to hear the birds. I wish we could screen in our porch. May have to think of a way. Blessings, xoxo, Susie
Screening in your porch sounds like a good idea, Susie.
I’m lost in rug-making these days. Everything else just goes right over my head—until it doesn’t. Hope you enjoyed your foggy morning. It burned off much too quickly around here. I miss my foggy San Francisco mornings. Ah, well. Memories.
It hung around here for a few hours and it was lovely.
It has been so hot and humid here I’ve pretty much given up on the garden. There is no end in sight. I’m looking forward to mums and pumpkins! Your pictures give me hope though that I may find the energy to salvage some summer. We saw the Fred Rogers documentary last night and loved it. Particularly these days when kindness seems to be in such short supply we give it 2 enthusiastic thumbs up!
It’s been very hot and humid here as well. I’d say for most of the summer. Just keep walking around and looking at everything that’s in bloom. Take pictures. It will help.
I look forward to seeing that documentary. Also want to see the one about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Beautiful pictures Claudia
Love the contrast of the little bird in the trees
Don clearly has competition
Stay cool and dry
Siobhan
I’d put it the other way because I was into photography long before Don – “I clearly have competition!”
I love how you captured those Canadian Geese. It is fascinating to watch them in unison.
Marilyn
Thank you, Marilyn!
Glad you had a nice morning. And that you have such awareness of everything around you; the mindfulness, consciousness to absorb your surroundings and feel gratitude and ‘visited’. Special moments in time.
This is the first day of our newest heatwave in SoCalif. We’re not used to the humidity along with it, and that’s all we get now but, who knows, maybe it’ll drop in the worst of it, I never know anymore. (This is no longer the California of my past here.) We’ll be 90 degrees today, then high 90s for days after, tomorrow and Tuesday especially being over 100. Hot week ahead; yuck.
I just don’t want another day that hits 111 degrees (F) like we recently had. It’s a brutal summer here and I’m over it! Went to the beach midday yesterday and it wasn’t much heat relief; better to go later in the day. I’m tired of the heat outdoors deciding what will be my schedule. (Of course you’ve just had the same thing and ongoing, with rain AND heat.) I get grumpy. I really only go outside right now at night unless we have daytime errands which of course is just part of life. I have many indoor projects I can do but, of course, even with A/C, all you want to do, especially in the afternoons, is go quiet and I don’t like to leave any lights on inside although I’m then hampered by my troubled eyesight for trying to work on even the most mundane.
The frustrating thing here is, as you know, we don’t get a cool Fall; we go straight from summer to the hot-dry Santa Winds out of the east. It used to be that we’d drop in temps the first week in November but it’s hard to tell now how anything’ll go because the climate/weather is so ‘off’. When will we cool off? Nothing in sight.
Did you catch any of these recent headlines? California’s Imperial Valley in the south (where they got a high of 121 degrees, Death Valley being 127 degrees; I think this was July 24?), ‘set the stage for the world’s hottest rain’. Was in NEWSWEEK, “The temperature might have gone higher in Imperial Valley if not for clouds that streamed in during the afternoon, with showers beginning to fall [at 4pm]…at the time the rain began, the temp was 119 degrees, a new world record for the hottest temp ever measured while rain was falling…weather professor at Columbia tweeted, ‘It means that not only is Earth getting hotter but also more humid, and that is the link between a changing climate and health’. Then, from Scripps Oceanography (and it was in Forbes online, too): “Warm Ocean Temperature breaks San Diego’s 102-year record…sea-surface temps at the Scripps Pier reached 78.6 degrees today…the highest ever recorded in 100 years of data collection”(this was Friday, day before yesterday). Our governor says we are entering into uncharted territory in California; of course we have the highest incidence of wildfire over the past 15 years as opposed to anywhere else in the U.S. We are the worst place to live for wildfire, Hawaii and Delaware being the best/safer. (But then look at poor Hawaii and all that lava!)
I think you better stay in New York, Claudia.
Of course (these eyes) I meant Santa ANA winds. And needless to say, that bizarre rain in Imperial Valley evaporated before it really hit the ground. Because, as we all know, it never rains in California(!).
Since you and Don spent time in La Jolla/SD, thought you might find that interesting if you hadn’t already read it. A lot of people in other parts of the country have no idea how COLD the Pacific Ocean is, which is why surfers in large part always have to wear a wet suit. We ain’t the Caribbean here! I’d go in the water so much as a kid, would get very chilled; the sun and my warm beach towel on the sand would always feel very good afterward. My cousin’s husband has been surfing for 30/more years and I’ve never seen him surf without a wet suit although he’s generally doing it before work at like dawn/6am; maybe on these hottest weekends, he’s able to surf without one in midday (I’ll ask him).
It’s why when I lived on the Gulf Coast for awhile, I was so surprised with the ocean at Galveston being too warm. I swear that water is 90 degrees in summer there and I didn’t find it pleasant (although I loved Galveston as a beach city/destination, as often as I could get there, except for one Labor Day when I felt absolutely cooked by the humid heat). Is your Atlantic, where you and Don hit the beach, a swimmable ocean in terms of comfort-level? It’s nothing I’ve ever much come across in my reading and I of course have never been there – – I mean, I spent a day in Miami once but I never took a dip in the sea (stop-over flight only; visiting friends; not enough time) and Miami is so further south than where you live ‘way in the north seaboard; two diff worlds.
Claudia, I’m positively CRAVING autumn! Like I want pumpkin cookies. And my Fall decor out. How I will cherish a cool, crisp morning! I hope we get some of those. What it would feel like to sleep with a cozy blanket or ever wear long sleeves again; maybe even a soft cardigan! I know it’s coming, somehow! It’ll always feel like back-to-school for me, and I loved school, so September-October was my favorite; always looked forward to it.
I’m not sure about the Atlantic. It’s been a long time since I’ve dipped a toe in the ocean. The Pacific, yes. The Gulf of Mexico, where my sister lives, yes. If we can finally get to the beach for a day, I’ll see.
You know, people actually LIVE in the Imperial Valley. (What is that, like 100 miles or so due east from SD? I think it’s a straight line from there to there, and desolate.) My grandma resided there as a teen; the family was actually there from about 1915 to 1919. Mom would tell me that Grandma remembered a lot of lettuce being grown there. But, shoot, with those kinds of temps they just had? There’s probably a lot of wilted lettuce!
xo
Hate the Santa Ana winds.
It’s horrifying. All of it. We had a chance to do something about climate change but we didn’t do enough and now Trump is undoing everything.
You are absolutely correct. Al Gore tried to make people very aware SO early on, he being a public figure that people would maybe listen to when they couldn’t get thru the scientific articles and when maybe climate change/global warming sounded too off the wall.
I don’t like to be a mean-spirited person but my eye caught a CNN headline online yesterday (didn’t read it; just liked the caption) about Trump ‘tying himself in knots’. I thought, “Well, GOOD.” He’s been tying all of us in knots for far too long already. And throwing kinks into anything progressive and good. I despise him.
I don’t think there is such a thing as being ‘mean-spirited’ where reactions to what Trump has done and is doing are concerned. I despise him as well and I want to see him shamed, lose all of his assets and end up in prison. In solitary confinement.
I’m gonna let go of this now, two days back, and I appreciate your comments because you’re pretty much always spot on with me but, like, yes, when the Paris Accord was such a positive move in the right direction, with all countries banded together to try to figure out what we can do NOW to save our planet from becoming uninhabitable due to warming, Trump pulls us out of it? Doesn’t he care about the generations in his own family which follow him? Does he want to be the ancestor that contributed to their demise?
And now, the lunacy of which is beyond-the-beyond when I didn’t think we could go anymore ‘beyond’ with him, he’s blaming California for its own wildfires, leaving experts with Cal Fire and specialists who study this and deal with it to stare blankly at such unbelievable ‘theory’ and statements from Trump, like how do you respond to such lack of information and preposterousness, one of them stating, rather to the point and appropriately, that Trump lives in a fantasy world; the makes-no-sense crap coming out of his mouth making him look like the utter fool he is and worse but, in the meantime, with how we’re suffering in California, adding insult to injury and only grudgingly and complainedly helping us with disaster relief when we’re having such a awful, awful time?
I can’t even imagine what President Obama must be thinking, to see all his good actions toward safeguarding the U.S. from so many things be recklessly undone by the man who succeeded him. I miss Obama’s dignity, intelligence and humanity.
Today – he has allowed asbestos in some products again. He should be going on trial for potential mass murder.
Unbelievable. Again, it makes no sense. He’s abnormal, so there’s no way normal people can MAKE sense of him. Mueller, hurry up!
I’m hoping something happens SOON.
It was another very hot day here too Claudia…real feel 103 degrees so I was stuck in the house again…no rain but it is on its way back to us very soon…Your morning sounds like it was absolutely perfect!…and I love the pictures!…Wishing good weather for both of us real soon!
Boy this has been a difficult summer, weather-wise! I’m so ready for something approaching ‘normal.’
I love your garden and your birds. Your photography skills have always been so good, and they are just getting better. You and Don have picked a wonderful area of study. We are all being blessed because of your cameras.
Oh, thank you so much, Tana!
HAHAHA! Vicki, Great Catch on “Knotty” President Trump!
Judy A-
Dear Claudia, FAB! shot of the bird in the tree! Really perfect!
Thank you so much, Judy!