“How good a day can it be when it begins with your hand shoved up a turkey’s butt?”
(yours truly)
I try to live a life of thankfulness; grateful for not only the Big Good Things that come into my life, but also the myriad Small Good Things that are, in the end, part and parcel of this human existence. But while I hold appreciation for a day set aside solely to give thanks, being who I am, at the same time I cannot help but see the irony. The suffering of 45 million turkeys raised only to be killed for this day, the tradition of stuffing them and then ourselves with the intention of creating little more than an after-dinner stupor so as to be properly shored up for the insanity of Black Friday Christmas shopping more symbolic of everything wrong with our society than symbolic of gratefulness for blessings both great and small that are continually woven through our lives.
And so this morning, feeling more than ever the added pressure of personal matters that have splintered my family as well as the frightening news from Mumbai, India, where reside both coworkers and a daily photo group member, I awoke in a rather subdued, if not downright cranky mood. The weather has finally and seemingly gleefully gripped November’s gloom tightly with both hands and while it’s not raining – or sleeting or snowing – on the Thanksgiving Day parade, it’s certainly doing little to welcome a weary heart to another new day.
For the furballs in residence and those living free, it’s just another day. And it is from them that I will take my cue and focus on the Small Good Things, letting them fill my basket until my smile returns. One Small Good Thing was found in reaping the benefit of patience this week. The majority of the truckloads of pumpkins brought in on Halloween night went into what was intended to be our own harvest-of-pumpkins garden that had fallen unexpected victim to some sort of blight and so since late summer had sat empty and forelorn. Pumpkins and squirrels make for hilarious photo ops, and I suppose that in a way it’s almost cheating to create a stage set of sorts, but we’ve all gotta eat and, by gods, a rounded diet is a healthy diet so for the seasonal-eating squirrels, if I can give them pumpkins, I will give them pumpkins.
It’s taken a while for the squirrels to get into them, though. Until the temperature drops and maintains a consistent chill both night and day they continue to mainly forage and bury, wisely leaving most of the nutritious seeds safe and secure in their natural container. But eventually opening day arrives, and I grab Matilda and go out back to have some annual fun.
These fall pumpkin shots are always bursting with color and when we received a short but wet, ground-covering snowstorm a few days ago it lent a unique and brighter dimension.
The pine squirrels have been very loudly out in force, and their tiny size allows them to easily dart in and out of the opened pumpkins. Their lightning-speed darting, however, makes it difficult to get a good shot unless they momentarily focus their wee minds on actually gathering the seeds instead of fending off their larger competition, both real and more often imagined. In bad late afternoon light early this week I watched as three of them were having a late supper in the pumpkin bed, but as soon as I brought out Matilda, every single one of them took off and never returned. I was disappointed but determined, so kept an eye out for them and finally was able to catch one of them in the act:
As I write this, everyone has started getting into the act and yesterday’s daily was of Titan in action. The boy has grown up to be one fine specimen of a fox squirrel, and he’s certainly eating well!
Being (allegedly) on vacation this week, I was able to make the requisite mad dashes outside when the ‘hood hawks made their daily hunting rounds. Unlike the brightness of the color on the ground, shooting raptors against the gloomy grey sky continues to prove more practice than productive, but when both the Cooper’s hawk and the red tail hawk showed up within a few hours of one another, it made for very exciting and very fun afternoon.
The Coop appeared first and it was “stick-picking” time from the back patio, aiming three doors down. It’s distance from my vantage point allowed for a wider f-stop, and the shallow depth-of-field resulted in not-too-shabby a capture, especially considering the lack of light.
The red tail was a hungrier and a far less-cooperative subject. I became a hunter hunting a hunter and ended up following it clear to the end of our block trying to get just one “ok” shot to record its visit. Every time it would land, I’d hurry over to what seemed like a decent position but by the time I set down the tripod and quickly began to focus, it would head off to another tree. So I’d pick up and move again. And again. And again.
You get the picture. This is the only half-way decent one I got:
But life’s much more about the journey than the destination so today I’m thankful that I have such opportunities in my life.
Leave a Reply