Some of you may recall that I named this chicken Coquette in honor of a famous Parisian chicken who is buried in a tomb in Paris. I wanted to see if I could bond with a chicken if I gave it a name and paid attention to it. I tried, but a couple of months later, I have to tell you that the relationship has not evolved. I am impressed with the industriousness of chickens, and their single-minded focus on food, but they are not very interesting to me, and I think they are dumb as rocks.
  I will take good care of Coquette, and I enjoy seeing she and the other hens march around from here to there all day. But I think that’s about as far as we’re going to get.

This photo was taken with a 180 mm lens with an extender, aperture 3.5, shutter speed
1/200, ISO 1000

  The thing that got to me about this photograph was that I didn’t do a thing but point the camera and shoot. If you circle the birdbath, the light plays off the surface differently as you turn, and when I got to one side, the leaf seemed almost illuminated by a spotlight, which was the early evening sky, through thick clouds. It almost seemed as if the leaf was performing on stage, had a role to play, a message to offer,  and perhaps it did.

  July 22, 2008 – So what is it about these leaves in the birdbath, that they catch my eye and touch me? There is something slightly emotional about them, the way they are waiting, floating around. Five or six more of them blew into the stone birdbath today, and I got home around dusk and I really like the way that late light plays on the water, just revealing enough color, but not too bright. The birdbath, like almost everything else in the world, has a story to tell, if you are looking for it and listening.
  I think the story is that life is short, and how we spend it is important, and it is possible to find peace and calm and fulfillment if you look for it and work hard. At least that’s the story I saw of this leaf, which can’t be more than a couple of months old.
  And it’s probably the story I want to find. I don’t know if it’s a happy ending or not, but it seems graceful, a good way to end the life of a leaf.
  You can make too much of small and ordinary things, yet if you do notice them, you can connect with a sense of the nature of life itself, and its beautiful, sometimes brutal rythyms and cycles.

 July 22, 2008 – Breeders and trainers often talk about the character of a dog, and I know what they mean. Rose has character. She is alert, purposeful and reliable. She can be counted on to do what she needs to do and what I need her to do. In the dog sense, she has a lot of integrity. She is often looking at me with this look – “what’s up?” – ready to go to work.

  Winston Sr. has fully recovered from the wounds he suffered at the lands of his late son, and spends most of his days up behind the house near the Pig Barn. He is no longer strong enough to march around the farm and hill, and he can no longer make it the hill to visit Orson’s gravesite. His appetite is pretty good though.

___

P.S. I loved “Dark Knight.” Found it all it was hyped to be, and will go see it again. I grew on on those graphic novels, and they were powerful and dark, and the movie is a great reflection of that.