"...And behold a little stream checked my further progress, which, with its light ripple, bent the herbage that sprouted on its bank." So says Dante about his encounter with the river Lethe, the "water of Oblivion, which implies that the soul, which desires to attain to a state of innocence, must forget and cast behind it all those sins and failings that it has either committed or known, in order to attain to simplicity of mind, and to remove every incentive to sin." While not so convinced about the removal of certain darker incentives, I can vouchsafe that having reached this little Creek, much of my "further progress" was checked and I sometimes feel as if I have found some sort of "simplicity of mind" here.
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| Upsidedown |
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| Winter Creek (January 5) |
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| Winter Sycamore Leaf |
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| Mac |
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| Old and dried out stump up close |
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| Peach blossom and the start of a spring garden (March 12) |
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| April 3 |
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| Two Dead (April 10) |
So, Mac the cat raided, killed, and brought to the kitchen door these two young opossums. I set them side by side.
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| Didelphis virginiana Alive (April 11) |
The following day a third opossum was brought to the kitchen door, but this one was cold and barely alive. We warmed it and fed it a bit of applesauce and rehydrated lamb's milk. For the night it slept on a bed of paper towels set inside a plastic flower pot atop a heating pad. Next morning we found a local wild animal rehab couple and handed off the little one to them (they had just received another four-inch long baby opossum the day before).
If I were to reach into the flower pot to pick up the young one, it would hiss like we've all heard older possums do when threatened. But as soon as it was in my hand, it would clutch tightly with its claws and climb up my arm and bury its face in any shirt fold it could find.
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| http://opossumsocietyus.org/ |
One learns all sorts of things from the Society's website. Say, for instance, that "It was once believed that the male opossum mated through the female opossum’s nose." Before I could doubt how anyone could imagine...I kept reading: "Observers had seen the female with an empty pouch one day. The next day she was seen with her nose in the pouch making sneezing sounds. Later, upon examination of the pouch, tiny embryos were found."
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| Less than common yellow paintbrush (April 11) |
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| Garden greens and wild hog sausage |
(The word comes from Algonquian wapathemwa meaning "white animal. ")
