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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything

Yah Cayent Geht Thayah Fhum Hayyah

Everyone seemed to like my garden yesterday, so you get more pitchas; and I get to knock off early today, and accomplish a fatherly and achieve a paternalistic and break the daddified tape and so forth without much additional effort. The search for lack of additional effort required is a mark of the breed.

  So reader and writer and all-around swell guy westsoundmodern commented yesterday:

Sheesh! From the way you’ve described the place in the winter, I had in my minds eye a vision of standing at the north pole and turning a 360.

Okey dokey, Butch. Let’s say you’ve got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals. You go see an abandoned house in Uppastump, Maine, Decemberish, and you look out the back window and see this:

I triple-dog-dare you to do the mental arithmetic that produces this, a year later, in your mind’s eye:

Well, you know me; I deserve a Fields Medal for mental arithmetic, but that’s way, way past my best shot. You need the Rainman love-child of Salvador Dali and Martha Stewart doing your mental arithmetic to get from there to here.

I hope all you dads get sommodiss in your garden today:

Pony up, mom.

13 Responses

  1. It's been a great season for the lupines, hasn't it? If you flew over MDI right now you'd likely see an ocean of purple and pink below you.

  2. Oh, that's purty. All that greenery makes me homesick for the place I grew up.

    Happy Father's Day, Sipp.

  3. Really nice! I guess we get spoiled in SoCal – spoiled or so bored we don't appreciate it anymore. Even our St. Francis looks bored, staring at the same stuff all year.

  4. Neat how you can photoshop out all the icebergs and stick in kittens and flowers and leaves. Being trapped in the house twenty-four hours a day by darkness and ice has let you develope some mad skills

  5. Pan right. Pan way, way, way right. Zoom in. Yes, those bones under the smashed up greenhouse, deep in the mulch, dig them up. Check the back pocket. Pull out the wallet and read the ID. H…O…F….F…

    There's a reason it was cheap and another reason the foiliage grows so well with so little Miracle Gro.

  6. @vanderleun. You sayin' that it is these meadowlands?

    Said it before, say it again, fantastic view!

  7. Living up here in the northwest, I just can't wrap my head around the concept of four distinct seasons.

    Oh, they have the same names as the seasons in your neck of the woods do, it's just that if I took seasonal pictures from a single vantage point in my yard they would reveal;

    Winter: 35 degrees and raining. All is very green.

    Spring: 39 degrees and raining. Again, all is green. Tender shoots and new growth struggle to emerge during a week in April when temperatures briefly stray into the 50's only to be killed by a twelve hour hard freeze on May 1st.

    Summer: Pretty much the same as Spring except between the dates of July 5th and August 5th when temperatures, rising into the low 70's, create an epidemic of some sort of mass hysteria in which the citizens become catatonic and wonder the streets repeating zombie like "It's so hot…can you believe how hot it is?" At some point in late August the temperature will reach 80 degrees and the sound of thousands of square inches of fish belly white skin frying in the sun can be heard as far away as Portland.

    Autumn: The trees are all coniferous so again, all is green. On September 1st the temperature will drop to 39 degrees and it will start to rain. It won't stop until July 5th.

    Your yard may not look like much in December, but at least when you stick your head out the door in Maine you can tell within sixty days give or take what month of the year it is.

  8. That plant growing around your heteronormative statuary appears by it's foliage to be jewelweed. If it gets a very pretty orange mottled flower it probably is. It is the best remedy for poison ivy bar none. We make a tea from the leaves and freeze it into ice cubes. Often grows where the ivy does though, so look out. Convenient though.

  9. Lovely! Far more lush than our northern Retriever den (we have very sandy soil, thin skin over granite, lotsa lichens. Like your pictures, and the new blog format. Happy Father's Day, belatedly.

  10. Thanks, everyone, for reading and commenting.

    teresa- Our last home was the devil's own nursery of poison ivy. It grew in the sun and in the shade; up the trees and around them; it camouflaged itself in some places to snare you, it grew in the middle of the drive to taunt you. I was surprised to never to find it growing in my refrigerator or out of my ears.

    I know and look forward to poison ivy's haughty mien and potential irritations and extractions of vital fluids like I know the leisurely politician's.

    There is no poison ivy here.

  11. crap. I iz jealous

    it's looks even better…. in these photos…

    what a lovely view where you live, and every yard needs a cat to look like it owns it…

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