What kind of a bird has a speckled breast? I found out that some thrushes do, but this bird is a juvenile robin. Makes sense, since last summer I asked the same question about the speckled breast. Thanks, Michelle, for identifying my young robin.
Just last week I saw baby robins in a nest; when my daughter and I checked on Saturday, they were still in the nest, cawing away, and just a bit bigger. She counted four baby robins.
Do you know of a bird with speckled breast?
The photo shows a blue robin egg. Then the robin babies are born, and they depend on mama and papa robin. After a while, the baby robins get more feathers and fly off from the nest. A young robin is a bird with speckled breast. The mature robin has a red breast. I’ve seen robins with worms in their mouths. I’ve also seen them eating my raspberries.
I’ve been following Phyllis’s blog about her son, Sam, who has acute myeloid leukemia. Refuah Shlayma – healing wishes and prayers to you, Sam.
Jewaicious wrote about Nora Ephron‘s books and movies: “but no matter the genre, they always speak of women, independence, perseverance and realizing potential.”
I was driving down to Manalapan, NJ (carpooling my teenage son and friends to a counselor orientation) and decided to drive by the Battle of Monmouth. This battle was fought on June 28, 1778 between the British and the Americans. There is not much to see other than this pretty field with a wooden fence; somewhere nearby there is a visitor center that is open on the weekends. Supposedly, every year on the last week in June, the battle is re-enacted here in Monmouth Battlefield State Park. I think I may have seen the Sutfin House in the distance from my car. My previous post showed purple vetch growing in the field. I did find orchards (Battleview Orchards) nearby.
Due to the wooden fence, I get to share my battlefield adventure as part of Thursday Challenge.
And I just discovered another meme: Rural Thursday. (If you saw the rest of Manalapan, you would say, gee, this battlefield park is the only rural area left).
I caught this squirrel with a strawberry in his mouth (is it a wild strawberry or one of our garden strawberries – not sure, but it looks like the wild kind). So I grabbed my camera and decided to do Nature Notes. I confess, I haven’t been doing much observing of nature, though I have been gardening. My peas did very well in their cage this spring; I saw a deer walk right past the gardening cage (but the deer did take a chomp out of the tomato plants that were outside the cage).
I did not plant this tall lily in this spot behind my pink rose bush. I used to have similar lilies in a different part of my garden; I probably pulled them all out by mistake when I was weeding. Or they died a natural death. So I was surprised to see a lily blossom elsewhere in my yard.
The raspberries that grow on old can are now ripening in our backyard. The ones on new cane are usually more abundant, and we get to enjoy those in August. Last year wasn’t a great crop; maybe this year will be better? I read somewhere that one should prune the raspberry bushes so they have space in between them. I tried to do some pruning last year. It is hard to photograph a raspberry – the camera doesn’t realize you want to focus on that tiny berry.
Lavan, Yaakov, Leah or Rachel
My daughter and her friend worked very hard on this diorama for her school’s Torah Fair. It’s sort of like a science fair, explained my husband, except the subject matter was all from the book of Breishit. My daughter’s project depicted the wedding of Yaakov and Leah. Or was it Yaakov and Rachel? In any case, for those of you who don’t know the story, Yaakov first had to work seven years to marry Leah. He thought he was marrying Rachel, but Lavan, Leah and Rachel’s father, tricked him into marrying Leah. After seven more years, he got to marry Rachel. Poor Leah – I once did a painting of Leah crying.
In other news, my eldest son graduated from high school, which emotionally is charged for me – how could my first baby be a high school graduate? We discussed in the car on the way home what is the meaning of “real life” – does being a high school graduate mean one has entered the real world? According to my niece who just finished her first year of college, college is not real life.
The school art assignment was to draw oneself as an older person. This was my daughter’s execution, which she proudly displayed at her school art show last night.
As for myself, I’m trying once again to take a breath by blogging. I admire Robin’s style, in which she both displays nuns in tan and discusses her plumbing traumas. My events of the week involved two down servers, both effecting sites that I work on, both now back up and running again. Is it the season to upgrade PHP perhaps? In one case I called the help desk; the line declared a fifteen minute wait. I hung up, then called back a few minutes later, thinking, I can wait fifteen minutes to find out what the problem is. The line then declared a one hour wait. I waited until the next day, until it was fixed. But then the other server went down, and that one I had to report about ten times before they fixed all the issues. Such as is the life of a webmaster (webmaven?).
In my front yard many pink Mexican poppies are in bloom. My husband remembers the days when he had to mow the front lawn – no more.
There is also purple salvia growing behind the pink Mexican poppies.
The tall green plants behind the Mexican poppies in this shot are lambs’ ear. I originally planted a few that I transported from my mother’s garden in Newton, MA. That was in 1998, so these have been reproducing for over ten years. I’ll probably pull most of them out soon and replace them with summer plants, maybe cucumber plants that I grow among the flowers.
These flowering chives are growing in a pot in my backyard, but since they are in a pot, I could easily transfer them to the front.
When I originally conceived of the idea for this post, my intention was to write about the short story Cold Spring by Aaron Appelfeld. In fact, I took out The Oxford Book of Hebrew Short Stories (edited by Glenda Abramson) from the library because the book contained a story I had read in high school (mind you, this was in the 1970’s) called “Cold Spring.” We had read it in the original Hebrew, and at the time the style of writing must have made at least a bit of an impression on me. “Cold Spring” takes place directly after World War II has ended. In Appelfeld’s typical style, the story does not talk directly about the Holocaust. It merely alludes to the tragedy the characters have left behind. Appelfeld paints a picture for the reader, but like a realist who only accentuates certain details, we must guess what the full story might be.
However, as I read through the other short stories, I decided I couldn’t write a post without mentioning some of those that had an effect on me. Several authors were women that I had never heard of. I noted that the book is called Hebrew Short Stories as opposed to Israeli Short Stories – some were written well before the founding of the modern State of Israel.
One of the stories that made me change my mind and write about more than one short story was “Sunbeams” by Dvora Baron. I told the synopsis of the story to my daughter and her friend: a young orphan in an Eastern European village is handed from household to household, grows up this way and learns not to depend for affection on any one human, is finally happy when working in a bakery, gets married (not so happy a marriage), her husband dies, she goes back to her shed and bakery. Then she dies. My daughter and her friend declare: that is *SO* depressing, how could you like such a story. I really enjoyed this well-told story. There’s a cow that’s a central player (I think the main character’s affection goes to this cow). The main character learned to be content, even if her life was difficult.
Want to know what *I* thought was depressing? “Cut Off” by Yitzhak Dov Berkowitz is a tale of an elderly woman who travels to New York to be with her only living son – her other children died in childhood and her husband more recently. She discovers her son has changed his name from Rabinowitz to Robbins, and all he seems to care about is showing her how much money he has made and how American her family is. She hands her grandsons prayer books she brought with her from Europe. They clearly have no idea what to do with them. The older one puts his back, while the younger son at least wraps his in yellow paper to protect it. At least he wants to show his grandmother some appreciation.
The last two stories in the book, “Morning in the Park with Nannies” by Savyon Liebrecht and “Dora’s Secret” by Ruth Almog both have Holocaust themes. Both stories have unique methods of using post-Holocaust, modern life settings (a park with nannies and a home in St. Cloud, France) to relay Holocaust tragedies. I own a copy of Savyon Liebrecht’s book It’s All Greek to Me in Hebrew that I bought in 1991. Maybe I should try reading it again.
The book has a wonderful introduction to the history of modern Hebrew literature. All of the modern Hebrew authors I know are included in the volume with the exception of the masterful S.Y. Agnon (the noble prize winner in literature), as they could not get permission to print the short story of his they wanted. If you do read any of the stories in this collection, I would be curious to hear which made an impact on you.
White Columbine with bits of Purple Salvia
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I decided to just write up a review. And show off my white columbines with fuzzy purple dots that are really geranium sanguineum (cranesbill) in the background. I assume a deer ate the tops of some of my columbines; I don’t think the ground hogs can reach up that high.
I’ve been very busy with work and with a few (thankfully minor) family crises (an infected finger by one child, a tummy virus right before a big talk by another, a fall with only bruises by an older family member). Hope life goes smoothly in the future, (but it never does, does it?).
