Bright Sides

(After all the gloom and doom I figure I owe them to you)

Ever since we started showing at the Altamont Fair I have wondered about some night calling insects we first heard there. By the French Fry booth in fact...just down from the cider house...They make a scritchy, scrapey sound that is quite loud, but I never could pinpoint one to see what it was.

Then a few years ago I started hearing them here too. Probably they were here all along, but I didn't notice...maybe the multitudinous crickets drowned them out. Soon I found myself standing outside for a few extra minutes on late summer's evenings, listening and wondering.
What the heck was making that noise?

I thought for a long time that they might have been katydids, but the songs in online catalogs were never exactly right. It was frustrating.

The other night I was coming to the house in the early darkness, listening as usual, when one tuned up his song about three feet from my head. I spun around, flashlight probing, and there he was in all his green and buggy splendor, a gigantic katydid. So that mystery is solved.

Then there is the morning sun slanting across dew-soaked Queen Ann's lace...spotlighting the red six-bar gate and making it look like it was written in fire against its cowey background. Geese zig-zagging north, south, east and west, barking like a world full of beagles and turning the tame sky wild.

Finding dozens of minute orange, red, and gold crab apples adorning the tiny tree that volunteered along the driveway. Their colors are more vibrant than the sugar maples even, like delightful Christmas balls decorated in fresh fall colors. (They will show up tomorrow in the Sunday Stills post.)

An odd white caterpillar that wiggled so fast across the grassy ground that it was hard to get a picture of him. The wild turkey that for some reason visits the wood stove every morning. Chipmunk striped baby chicks in the calf pen. Mama is so funny, keeping them behind the gate by pecking at them amazingly hard. I think baby chick is the lightest substance known to man. They seem to move by levitation....especially when dodging that stabbing beak.

George and Laura, the fluffy white banty chickens Teri gave to Liz last year as baby chicks. They are always together and look so striking, like bright white feather flags everywhere they go. And tiny George, who could sit in the palm of my hand crowing the sun up (and down and all day in between) is king of all he surveys. Woe betide Mr. Fluff, or the speckly rooster or the brown ones if they step in his way or look crosswise at his precious Laura! He is one tough cookie for all his dainty appearance.

Every walk to the clothesline, trip to the cow barn, visit to the woodstove, or jaunt to feed the pony brings a wealth of sweet surprises to every passing day. Bright sides everywhere you look.