Beauty All Around Me

Even after being up all night on a red-eye a week ago, when every other single soul on the plane was asleep,  including probably the captain and co-captain, I have to admit: it was stunning to fly west with the night and see the Sierra Nevadas from 35,000 feet just at sunset.It was more than thrilling to have seen the Arizona desert a few days before.They call it the Sonoran desert. Its saguaro cactuses, some of whom seem to be doing the Walk-Like-an-Egyptian dance, live for 200 years.None of us will reach 200. We can't hope to.The most we can hope for is the occasional glimpse like this, of a landmass that looks made up of the mounded backs, the living vertebrae of large unknowable creatures.But WHAT creatures, you think, on whom so many life-forms ride?' And who is the even larger Creature upon Whose back WE ride?Paul said it: We see through a glass now, only darkly and know only in part, but one day face to face.May it be so! May it one day prove to be so.

Goodbye Frog, So Long Mouse

Here’s a scary sight from the trip my family and I took out west. While the rest of sat like fat lizards in sun so dry the skin on your face tightens like a mummy’s, Annie went hiking with her super-fit man, then sat for a bit in a gully while he ran up the side of a mountain. As she sat by that little creek-bed she saw this snake eating a frog who, she says, cried out in heart-rending fashion until only his little hands remained, which you can just see disappearing down the snake's throat.When I emailed this picture to a member of the family who couldn’t come on this trip she wrote back to say it was the saddest thing she had ever seen and there sure is enough plenty of sad stuff in the great outdoors I guess. Plenty of 'sad' indoors too if you count mouse death.Our new housemates, freshly transplanted from Florida, stayed behind and shivered in the late March cold.  (Click here to see one of the nice big fires they made so as not to die of frostbite in the 20-degree nights.) I bring them up because yesterday when we were cooking together in the kitchen I saw evidence of mouse-life over by the earthenware jars where we keep the coffee. “Shall we set a trap and kill it right away or wait for warmer days when it will go outside on its own?” I asked Veronica who as a size Zero is not much bigger than a mouse herself. (See?)“Oh I hate to kill it!” she said at first, then some ten or 15 minutes later reversed herself: “I’ve been thinking about that mouse…” she began.So the a death sentence it was: I smeared peanut butter on a 59-cent mousetrap and here he was this morning, all nicely packaged for his trip to the dump.It does feel sad - such perfection of form gone down to death! - but that's how it is in this world. The poet Tennyson said it; nature IS red in tooth and claw.

David put him into the bag; Veronica and I were useless.