Look Behind You!

 

I turned around, and, with the sunrise is behind me, I loved this view.

Sunny Juliet is always ready for outdoor fun, but our style will be somewhat cramped for a while, because after spotting a very large porcupine in the yard (luckily, Sunny was in the house at the time), borrowing a live trap, and watching a couple videos online, I decided I did not have the necessary confidence for Stage 2, i.e., the release of the porky into the wild (far from my home) all on my own. And so, while Trapper Ron is on the job for the next two weeks, Sunny and I will be coming and going from the house with a stout leash between us. 

 

A friend suggested “maybe he’d leave you alone if you put out a salt block. They like salt." I thought, How about a welcome mat, too? Really, they are so cute, so droll! But they did a lot of expensive damage to a neighbor’s house and ate many tires off cars in my husband’s woodland past, and, if a dog tangles with a porky, consequences can be potentially life-threatening. It isn’t simply an inconvenient, no-fun headache, like a dog-skunk encounter.

 

So that’s a little news from the outdoor home front, where we also had our second morning of hard frost at our place. The two frosty mornings were not consecutive, however, and now Leelanau is in for a nice little stretch of sunny days, with highs of 60 degrees and above – perfect for enjoying the beautiful fall color, which is what inspired several of today’s photos.

Sunrise, still from behind me, has reached across the field to trees.

Looking at sunrise-lit trees glimpsed under cherries still in shadow.

As for the bookish home front, I have been doing everything possible to postpone coming to the last page of Precious Bane, by Mary Webb. Since bane is something poisonous, toxic, while what is precious is dear and beloved, the title (which comes from an oft-repeated phrase of the narrator) presents us with an oxymoron. Or should we see it (as Susan Cain might) as paradoxical but all the truer to life by reason of acknowledging paradox? Do you think a paradox is a contradiction?

 

Rather than provide a link to a standard source for Mary Webb's novel, I’m sending those of you who can’t wait to hear more about it to a blog post I found online, because I think the “literary gypsy” loves Precious Bane as much as I do, and I love it so much that I ordered a couple of new paperback copies for my shop, in hopes of sharing the book with others. It is a story in which we look behind us to a very different time, and the dialect is archaic and regional, but a reader falls right into its magic. At least, this reader did.

But here is the rising sun, which I can't deny you.

  

The porcupine’s appearance and a couple other minor challenges, on top everyone’s current major obsession (campaign season, dontcha know), had me in a rather downbeat mood for a day or two, and I feared that if I came to the end of Mary Webb’s novel during that time, it might just be the straw that broke the camel’s back, so I set Prue’s story aside for two nights and read a couple cozy mysteries back to back, and by Wednesday evening, with Trapper John’s promise of action on the porcupine front and a beautiful sunset, my courage returned. Below is the brilliant sky following the setting of the sun on Wednesday -- but for a more unusual and even more enthralling sight (in my opinion), take a look over on my photo blog, A Shot in the Light, to see what I saw when I turned around. At sunset as well as sunrise, it often pays to turn around and look in another direction.