A couple of real Losers

Double Rainbow, Watertown, NY

Hot Summer Sun Dog

Mill Street Falls, Watertown, NY

Ominous

Campfire Kaleidoscope

Long Point Sunrise

Skies Afire, Watertown, NY

The Burning Bush, Long Point State Park, Lake Ontario, NY

Hemerocallis fulva

It seems to me as if there are a lot of tiger lilies this year.

OK, first I'll confess that what I always called tiger lilies are actually orange day lilies, sometimes known as ditch lilies. The tiger is an entirely different species which was imported from the orient. Our ditch lilies were an important source of nutrition for the Native Americans, who roasted or boiled the roots for food. A year with a proliferation of tiger lilies would have been a good year for them, for it meant nourishing food for the winter ahead.

No matter. I'm not here to discuss tiger lilies anyhow. I'm here to discuss my sudden perception of them.

Since the last week of June, I have seen these tall-stalked orange and yellow flowers in what-seems-like every yard, along every fenceline, hugging the front of every home, not to mention the fields of them standing in open pastures and ditches.

I refuse to believe that they stealthily crawled into position and planted themselves, suddenly, in the spring of 2006. Although I don't know even one person who has ever planted one of these bulbs, it appears as though this ubiquitous blossom was somehow, at some time, cultivated in wide profusion.

That makes me wonder, were they there last year? And the year before? Have I only now noticed something that has been in front of me for all of fifty-plus years?

I don't mind telling you that I hate to think of that possibility being true. I think that we all want to feel that we are at least aware of our surroundings. How could I possibly have missed hundreds and thousands of bright orange blossoms, including the ones in my own yard, for so long?

The other possibility, the one that I'm banking on, is that some rare anomoly of climate, some strange combination of drought and heavy rain and early hot weather has made this the year of the tiger. After all, I found morel mushrooms in my yard this year, for only the second time in 20 years. There is a mysterious die-off of fish in Lake Ontario. There has been a huge increase in the number of woodchucks.

I'm sure that these are only signs of the ebb and flow of nature, it's normal cycles. And that gives me strange comfort.

Remember this as the Year of the Tiger, just as the ancients marked their years not by number, but by significant events and occurrences. It seems like a really special way to grab onto a mysterious and miraculous feat of Nature and her creator.

an apology of sorts

Having been called names, one looks back at one's own
angry outbursts over the years, and I recall having
once referred to Republicans as "hairy-backed swamp
developers, fundamentalist bullies, freelance racists,
hobby cops, sweatshop tycoons, line jumpers, marsupial
moms and aluminum-siding salesmen, misanthropic frat
boys, ninja dittoheads, shrieking midgets, tax cheats,
cheese merchants, cat stranglers, pill pushers,
nihilists in golf pants, backed-up Baptists, the grand
pooh-bahs of Percodan, mouth breathers, testosterone
junkies and brownshirts in pinstripes."

I look at those words now, and "cat stranglers" seems
excessive to me. The number of cat stranglers in the
ranks of the Republican Party is surely low, and that
reference was hurtful to Republicans and to cat
owners. I feel sheepish about it.

GARRISON KEILLOR