All Outdoors
Colorful harvest festivals are one marker for the arrival of autumn, but for me the surest sign that fall is here is the number of days I spend mucking about in Island ponds.
“Will you walk into my parlor?” said the Spider to the Fly; “Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy.”
The webs of funnel web weaver spiders might just be the very prettiest parlors of all, ready for a cricket, ant or grasshopper to drop by for a visit. Announced or not, an insect is a welcome guest to a funnel weaver spider.
Mark Twain had a thing for flies and it was no love affair. Attributed to him are multiple quotes that leave no doubt about how he felt about these flying fiends. In a letter to Albert Paine in 1910, Twain notes that he would prefer to have “ten snakes in the house than one fly.”
Mark did not mellow as he aged. In 1927, he quipped: “Nothing is made in vain, but the fly came near it.”
Americans should be hungry for change.
We, do, after all, waste a lot of food. Every day, our country’s discarded food could fill the Rose Bowl. Conservative estimates suggest that in the United States, at least 25 per cent, and more likely almost 50 per cent, of all food is wasted. We are not the worst offenders worldwide, though; that distinction goes to Britain and Japan. Americans do, however, exceed the global average of wasted food by about 10 per cent.
Mae West cynically noted that “Opportunity knocks for every man, but you have to give a woman a ring.”
An interesting ring coiled around my fingers last week. It was not the kind that Mae had in mind, but it was one that did provide me with a great opportunity to examine one of the more elusive snakes on Martha’s Vineyard: the ring neck snake.
Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.
I always do and I enjoy eating them too; there isn’t a nut around that doesn’t entice me. Hurricane Irene gave me and other nut lovers a gift of glut: nut glut.
Though the high winds toppled some trees, my black walnut tree held on straight and tall. What it did give up to the gusts was an early crop of nuts. Usually one must wait till later in the fall to harvest black walnuts.