Bird Tales and Slightly Improved Rosaries

 

Today as my neighbor and I walked in the daylong drizzle, the cranes were out and yelling a lot. One parent and a teen crane were over by the tennis court, and then we noticed a little swallow had gotten caught in the wire fence around the tennis court. We couldn't go rescue it because the cranes were right there, but then I said, "Maybe we can sneak into the tennis court and push it out." Just then the swallow freed itself and fell to the ground, and the teenage crane immediately began to peck at it. What to do? Should we intervene? Was the crane going to eat the swallow? But I think it was just curious, and the swallow quickly gathered its wits and flew away, so all is well.

There was a book I remembered seeing at bookstores when I was a kid called Serendipity about a big pink sea monster, and I had always wanted to read it, so a couple of weeks ago I ordered it online. When it arrived, parts of it seemed very familiar, because Serendipity hatches from a mysterious egg, and then she swims to the Gathering of All Fish in the presence of the Kings of the Fish without knowing they are royalty. Had I actually read it as a kid after all? I remember about the age of seven having a dream about a humble bird who finds a mysterious egg in a forest, and she hatches it and then goes to the Gathering of the Birds to find the Queen of the Birds. But while the sea monster story is more about ecology, the story I wrote based on my dream is a straight-up metaphor for Mary, because at the end the humble bird finds out she is the Queen of the Birds. So they are different enough that I don't think anyone would say I ripped off this author.

Here are some more recent photos. First is a Hamm's Bear salt and pepper shaker that Travalon found online.

These are the rosaries I got from the Evangelical thrift shop. It's hard to see, but the ones on the arm of the chair are pink (on the left) and blue (on the right) and appear to be for infants, and the little Guardian Angel that came with the blue one is one more piece of evidence for this. However, they are bracelets, and I prayed with the pink one at lunch today and then put it on, and it's too large for my average adult-sized wrist (slid right off!) so how would it ever fit a child? Are they actually necklaces for newborns?

These are my rosaries that needed some repairs. The red one is a broken rosary we found at the chapel at Marquette University, with the black bottom part being something Travalon found abandoned in a rental car when he worked at Enterprise. The black one is the rosary I found at an antiques shop in Minocqua with the crucifix removed and replaced by random trinkets. And the crucifix with three beads was something I found at the Evangelical thrift shop.

Here I have sort of repaired the rosaries. You can see the red one is still missing an Our Father bead (they are little clay roses), but the gold beads and more delicate crucifix suit it better than the thing Travalon found. So I put that on the black rosary, and it almost looks good now, but I think it would be better with a centerpiece. Jilly Moose says she has lots of centerpieces for rosaries, so hopefully I can get one from her.

And this photo isn't that fantastic, but you can get an idea of how beautiful the Capitol Dome looked from the roof of Fresco, where we went for Tiffy's birthday dinner, with the almost-full moon rising behind it.

It seems so long ago that we had a beautiful night like that. It has been raining nonstop for the last three days, or maybe years - it all kind of blurs together.

Famous Hat