Heat wave

The problem

Rough seas

The rolling sea

The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are.  If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities… If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

~ Rachel Carson

Parhelion

One sun dog

Sun dog, the phenomena of false suns which sometimes attend or dog the true when seen through a mist (parhelions).  In Norfolk, a ‘sun-dog’ is a light spot near the sun, and ‘water-dogs’ are light watery clouds; ‘dog’ here is no doubt the same word as ‘dag,’ dew or mist, as “a little ‘dag’ of rain.”  In Cornwall, the fragment of a rainbow formed on a rain-cloud just above the horizon is called a ‘weather-dog.’

~ Abram Smythe Palmer, Folk-etymology: A Dictionary of Verbal Corruptions or Words Perverted in Form or Meaning, 1882

Cooking in the new kitchen

Iced wax myrtle

Some sensible person once remarked that you spend the whole of your life either in your bed or in your shoes.  Having done the best you can by shoes and bed, devote all the time and resources at your disposal to the building up of a fine kitchen.  It will be, as it should be, the most comforting and comfortable room in the house.

~ Elizabeth David (1913-1992), “French Country Cooking”

Lightning Strikes

In a tunnel

If lightning is the anger of the gods, then the gods are concerned mostly about trees.

~ Lao Tzu

Turn about

Waves on the pond

Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow’s joy is possible only if today’s makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.

~ Andre Gide