The nice thing about our apartment is that it has a nice big window that looks out on a nice flat stretch of lawn, a typical square Florida reservoir pond, a typical South Florida canal, and a rather upscale horse farm, just on the other side of the canal, not one hundred feet from our two television-watching recliners; at which farm until recently I rode a little, until I felt I was getting too old and could get hurt. From this window I watch the horses and riders, some practicing Dressage, and some of whom, both horses and riders, I know personally, and also, the birds. (Whom I like to think I know well.)
The most permanent residents are the Muscovy ducks, birds that many think are common and vulgar, but not me, I like them. [see; contrarian]
But also, there are Ospreys, Cattle Egrets, Ibises, Black Ducks, an occasional Pin-tail, Marsh Hens, and Shore Birds including Lemkins, [sp.], (I call them Lipkins, after a former landlady), Storks, (I forget which kind), and everybody's favorite, the Roseate Spoonbill.* There's another one, a red bellied something, a small duck, I've forgotten his name. The hardest part of this blogging is remembering names. Oh, and one of my favorites, the Kingfisher.
One day, not long after my friend Einar had died, I was telling my riding coach about old Ein, and along came a Red Headed Woodpecker who landed right in front of me not twenty feet away. [Einar had red hair before it turned white], I felt it was a visit from Ein, perhaps to tell me he had made it to the Akashic Reading Room.
I started out with this post wanting to carve out a place to put random thoughts, thinking I had a serious need for such a place, but now I've misplaced all those thoughts. I've been visited lately by another old friend, someone who gifted me, right around the time when I found out that when a Sasquatch wants to make a friendly gesture towards a Sapien Sapien, they leave hawk feathers by their nest. I've been Hawk-feathered.
When I talked to my sister before my birthday she wanted to know what I wanted. I've already made it clear, for over the last seventy years or so, that I "Don't Want Nothin", my way of saying I'm not going to get you anything, but being her, she's a stubborn Virgo, (are Virgos stubborn?) By the way, actually I wish my sign was Mule, which animal by the way is not stubborn, just extremely intelligent. (Analyze That!)
Anyway, that very day, I'd restrained myself from buying another Rebecca West book, The Court and The Castle, and so I told her she could buy me that, used, from Amazon, and it showed up a few days later. I needed it because in another post as I mentioned, that great biographer Carl Rolyson had said it was one of her best, so I'm reading that now.
How's my book ban coming? Well, O.K. I guess..., this week. So now I'm reading the West book just mentioned; and a tiny book by Sara Churchill, Tapestry something; still sort of slowly hacking away at The Haunted Wood; Ingo Swann's Secrets of Power, Vol. 1; Holism and Evolution, (hacking away at that too), by Jan Christian Smuts, still hacking away at something by Luce Irigaray, maybe I'll focus more on her later, and also, you'd think this might confuse me, but not so far, The Outsider, by Colin Wilson, something I've had on the shelf for too many years.
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