Tammy in the laurel

Dogwood, wisteria, locust, now laurel.
It's a pretty good year for flowers in trees.

Omega Three!

Men's bathroom, Westside Bakery, Asheville.
No way to improve on this. Must simply document.
(It's easier to read if you click on it and see it bigger.)

Camp breakfast

Gib and Annie hosted a pre-summer family camp weekend last week. I got to cook breakfast at Camp Celo for the first time in ten years or so. Amazingly, between Micah Pulleyn and me (with a few pointers from Gib) we remembered how to do everything in the right order and served breakfast on time. I do like big pots.


Here's Gib leading a little good morning/singing/blessing before breakfast.


The Camp Celo garden is a wonder.

Feel the power

You know you want to.

Turtle wagon

At Gaelen and Nicole's.
I like pretty much anything with a turtle on it (or in it). I especially liked this.

Field Guide

A poem in honor of Jeff's photographs of pendulous racemes:


Field Guide
by Billy Collins

No one I ask knows the name of the flower
we pulled the car to the side of the road to pick
and that I point to dangling purple from my lapel.

I am passing through the needle of spring
in North Carolina, as ignorant of the flowers of the south
as the woman at the barbecue stand who laughs
and the man who gives me a look as he pumps the gas

and everyone else I ask on the way to the airport
to return to where this purple madness is not seen
blazing against the sober pines and rioting along the roadside.

On the plane, the stewardess is afraid she cannot answer
my question, now insistent with the fear that I will leave
the province of this flower without its sound in my ear.

Then, as if he were giving me the time of day, a passenger
looks up from his magazine and says wisteria.


Used here respectfully and lovingly but without permission.

at camp, and elsewhere, the flowers are produced in pendulous racemes

Open....kind of

This is the door of the antique store in Micaville last Friday. Beyond the obvious questions this sign poses (Why prop the door open if you don't want anyone to go in? How far away are you and how long will you be walking? etc.) I just love the apostrophe.

Bread & Puppet Returns!

Vermont's Bread & Puppet Theater returned to Penland last week for another excellent and bizarre show. They started with three little plays with flat cardboard puppets in this little cardboard theater.


A highlight was the Vermont Secessionist Party Sheepnose Choir.


Here they are singing. There were a lot of great voices in this company.


At the end of the show they revived a 47-year-old Bread & Puppet piece called "The King Story." Here are the King and the Great Warrior.


The King and the Blue Man and his son.


An epic battle between the Dragon and the Great Warrior.


Of course, the music was rollicking throughout.
(Look out! A banjo and an accordion in the same band!)

Life and light

Margot with Emma Feldman on a rainy spring Sunday.

Paul Feldman with glasseses

Gred vs P.I.

Gred Gross attempts to immunize himself against poison ivy through the traditional method of eating small poison ivy leaves.


Yum! Be sure to avoid the lips.

First Pizza

Gred fired up the new oven at the community center for the first pizzas. It worked beautifully and should get better with subsequent firings.


Here's Michael pulling a pie from the oven.