Nature's treasures. It is a delight to sit on the covered deck in the morning and be rewarded with all the activity at the butterfly bush and beyond. Yesterday there was the triple treat of two monarch butterflies and a hummingbird moth, curious little guy, and these were the first monarchs I had seen this year. This morning the triple treat was the swallowtails, especially the one I put in the picture for this entry. We have the black swallowtails and the yellow swallowtails and once a zebra swallowtail. Mary tried to take a picture of it, but the creature moved away too quickly.
Some of the flowers in her garden are still spectacular, especially a morning glory (what an appropriate name for this particular flower) that grows by the end of the coy pond. It is purple in the center surrounded by white, and each blossom lasts only one day, of course. There were two in bloom this morning. There is also a very tall, brilliant red hibiscus that falls into the spectacular category as well.
I am suddenly reminded that I had intended to chronicle the fate of the dozen disciples, well, tadpoles that we had raised from infantness, so to speak. The process went in stages. The first to go were the tree frog creatures as they very quickly learned they were in a large, clear plastic bowl, and up they went. Even though I helped with boiling the lettuce, she-who-must-be-obeyed got tired of fetching fresh pond water and changing the old out for the new. I never got tired of stopping on my way through the kitchen to peer over the edge of the bowl and watch the progress of the leg-growing. One of the next to change (or transition, as the meteorologists now say) to a new creature and absorb its tail developed a black mouth with black striped bands on its hefty legs. It looked like a Halloween creation made by Tim Burton. After we turned him loose, as well as several others, we were down to four. The fourth was very clever as he or she grew front legs rather quietly, keeping them folded into its chest. Since it still had a rather substantial tail and did not seem inclined to climb the walls, so to speak, we let it stay a bit, until I came into the kitchen one morning and found it perched close enough to the edge of the bowl so that it could get its toes over the edge. I tapped it lightly with my newspaper. It fell or leaped down into the water. We removed it within the hour and happily watched it swim away in the pond. That left three slow growers, so to speak. I suppose that if those had started maturing so slowly outside, they might have become food for something else, bigger and hungrier. Two of the three were the large kind as in the earlier picture, one was the very small black creature.
In any case, Herself was tired of changing the bowl out every few days and it was time to boil more lettuce or release them. We voted and since Mary's vote always outweighs mine, we released them. When we released them in the late evening at dusk, we could follow them in the pond for a while with a strong flashlight, of which we have plenty. (I love knives and flashlights!). We lost track of the little black one immediately, and the other two quickly too, as the sun was to bright to let the flashlight be effective. Every time I walk past the place where we kept the bowl in the kitchen, I glance over to see if it might magically have reappeared. Habit is a powerful force, as we all know too well. I miss them. I just couldn't do the water thing too well (I drop glass jars when I walk on uneven surfaces, etc.). Since the two bigger ones had almost stopped eating the lettuce, they were probably better off in the pond, or so I tell myself. However, watching a tadpole sprout hind legs, then grow front legs, absorb its tail and shrink its body, and change into an air breathing creature, a real frog, was a fascinating experience. And they really ate boiled lettuce, voraciously, too.
I took biology as one of my science requirements my freshman year in college. Someone "pithed" frogs for the class, sticking a needle into their brains. Each two students got one frog, which was technically dead, since it's brain was dead; or so we were told, yet it was still functioning: heart beating, blood circulating, I guess. I seem to remember the joy I took in someone's "dead" frog hopping down the lab table. Fortunately my lab partner, Bill Shank, maybe, was an enthusiastic prescience major, I think. In any case, he handled the knife and the pinning to the cutting board; I watched and learned to identify the various organs, but I did not enjoy the process much. I think I heard that schools had given up doing that. You could after all learn the parts from an illustrated book instead, get a bowl of tadpoles and then watch a real mystery unfold before your eyes, a mystery you could release at the end of the semester, perhaps. I remember the fourth tadpole one from the end. We thought he couldn't climb, but once he had all four legs, he would just hang in the water and float, all four legs extended. But then he went up the wall and out into the pond. All of them survived their incarceration. Tadpole camp was a success.
Oh. I took the plant course the second semester in college, whatever it was called. And announced my major as English literature.