The University Farm: Seasonal Charnel House

After parking, I watched two men get out of a truck and, while a third stayed behind the wheel, walk to the farm building's center back door, where they unlocked it and disappeared inside.

I minded my own business, wandered into the new hoophouse, ambled through, headed up the side of the larger hoophouse, then around it, all the time taking photos. 

When I noticed the dessicated butterflies, beetles, flies, bees stacked inside the interior folds of plastic, and, taken aback, thought of northern European still lifes of dead rabbits and birds and stacked fish on groaning boards, awaiting preparation and consumption, those reminders of fleeting time and death awaiting us all -- at that very moment, I heard a voice.

Looking to my right, I saw two of the men dragging a whitetail deer carcass (field-dressed and knife-slit-belly facing me) toward that very same door, swing it up the steps, go inside briefly, then come out, lock the door, and get in the truck. The third pocketed his smart phone, joined them, and they drove away.

Culling season in Sewanee, the season of darkness.

Distractions While Reading Outside

1.
The unexpected appearance of familiar companions.

2.
The mouth-watering smell of soup simmering, wafting through the kitchen door.

3.
The hummingbird that has taken up residence, reminding me of my deceased friend Betsy, who enjoyed them from this same summer vantage point.

4.

Missing Betsy.

Even on a Day without Sun

it's easy to be surprised, stunned even, by the beauty of the world as it is, even when it isn't as it should be or as one might like it.

I am grateful for small gifts.

Harbingers of Spring

A tiny grasshopper and an unknown bug anchored to a stem just beyond.









A tiny fly that scooted along the surface of the lake.












A dance fly and a smaller spider that leapt off the branch just after I snapped.









Surely, these are signs of spring coming, and I'm just starting to get warmed up.

A Life by Nature Made So Short

The fly died long before I saw it: its feet still sucking the window, its eyes facing natural light (or what there was of it).

I didn't kill it.  I didn't know it was there.  I never saw it enter or try to escape.

But still I feel guilty -- having opened a door through which it flew, perhaps, not knowing this room would be its tomb.

The fly, the paint-slathered frame, the paint-dotted glass, the gray sky.

A lonely portrait made beautiful by persistence.

Summer's Fly

Humorist Ogden Nash wrote:
God in his wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why.

No one need tell me who made this fly or why.His rainbow feast of oily electricity speaks for itself.