Pas de Deux

Sipping summer's store, 

Butterflies breakfast beneath

Bright September sun.

 

No Nature Girl

A few years ago, in one of my monthly newsletters (now morphed into The Goodweather Report blog,) I posted a closeup picture of a rather attractive fuzzy caterpillar, calling particular attention to his cute little pink feet.

As always, I had some email comments on my newsletter and there was a memorable one from my agent who took exception to my calling the caterpillar feet (or, indeed, the caterpillar) adorable.

In fact,  my agent's response was so  amazing that I  copied it to a file where I keep ideas for future use. And when I came to write Under the Skin, I used the response pretty much verbatim. putting it into the mouth of Elizabeth's sister Gloria who -- like my agent -- is no nature girl.

In the following scene, Elizabeth and her sister are at the beginning of a spa and seance weekend -- rather against Elizabeth's wishes.

--- As we walked up the path leading to the inn, I stopped by a high-arching clump of grass to admire a fuzzy yellow caterpillar teetering at the end of a glossy green blade. He had reared up and his tiny pink feet – the front six of them – were questing in search of their next step.

                        “Glory, come look at this guy and his adorable little feet!” It was worth a try, I thought. I’ll learn to love Dead Sea Salt exfoliation and maybe Gloria can get a little appreciation for Nature.

            My sister leaned down to see my find, wrinkling her nose in fastidious disgust. “Adorable? Those creepy little feet? If you killed that thing and stuck it with pins to some sort of board and looked at it under a microscope, you would see that those feet are anything but ‘adorable’ – they are vile little buggy mutant feet that look really gross close up.”

            She glanced at her watch. “We’ve got forty minutes before dinner – you can stay and visit with your yucky little friend; I’m going to go have a bath.”  ---

The butterfly pictures are for my agent -- she thinks butterflies are gross too. You can imagine how she feels about snakes.

But that's one of the revelations about writing -- if one just pays attention, there's a whole world of interesting material out there!

Do Butterflies Have Knees?

Monday was a perfect day to get out in the garden as rain was forecast for Tuesday. I had a few more potatoes to plant as well as some broccoli and kale and parsley starts to put into my box beds. 

This row of beds above has benefited from the helpful biddies in the chicken tractor which was carefully constructed by John to fit the beds. The girls eat the weeds and weed seeds and bugs and leave behind a bit of high powered fertilizer.

The swallowtail butterflies were knee-deep in the thrift. (Do butterflies have knees? Allegedly, bees do.)

Such beauties --  they seemed almost drunk on all that nectar!

You know I took more pictures...

Random Bits

We get lots of rainbows -- this one was especially low. Once we had a tiny one, stretching from the barn, across our drive way, and into the pasture. We haven't found the gold yet.

But the butterflies have found the butterfly bush . . .

Biggify to see the half-rainbow emerging from the trees on the left. . .

At the back door, a Georgia O'Keefe sort of grouping. . .

Stormy evening sky . . . more rain ahead.