Life – Page 23 – New England's Narrow Road

What kind of Seed/ Nut is This?

I am showing my stupidity here…but haven’t lived in the northeast long enough to learn all my tree names. I found a bunch of these “nut shells” on my neighbor’s property when I went to feed their chickens while they were away. I forgot to ask what they were, so I’ll ask here.

Since Beech trees are abundant, I thought maybe a Beech nut although I don’t know what those are. Then I remembered back to when I used to hike to Mill Hill in my childhood and there was a lone chestnut tree up there and thought maybe this was a chestnut shell – I saw no sign of any chestnuts near these pods though.

I thought I’d get a photo of them just for fun. I suppose some animal had eaten what was once inside.

Inspired by a Flower

I did a lot of gardening when I lived in Florida. It really wasn’t much fun in summer – and that is when the weeds would grow like mad of course – and I had just about every kind of southern flower and plant in my large yard. My favorites were the Camellias and Crepe Myrtle, but I also had lots of azaleas under the Oaks and yellow and white Jasmine covering the fence. I lived in that house for 12 years and added more to the yard each year.

The north has it’s own collection of gorgeous flowers that are not seen in the south. Hydrangeas are one such plant. It’s just too hot for many plants to survive that heat and the perennials need a dormant time (in winter) that the southern plants don’t get. At least not to the extent that the northern ones do.

I’ve been trying my hand at drying the blue hydrangeas that grow in the front yard of my rental house. I wrote a page about Hydrangeas and how to dry them, with lots of links, at my Squidoo site – if you are interested. I had one large blossom dry up nicely (in the picture to the right) and just added a few more smaller and darker blue ones to the vase, but my favorite thing to do is photograph them.

I think my pictures turned out better than my attempt at drying. I’ve used them to start a new store (#6) at Zazzle. I’ve sold many blue hydrangea cards and stamps from my main store- Narrow Road Designs, so this is an off shoot of that.

Click here to start your own Squidoo lens or to visit Blue Hydrangeas

Just When You Get Depressed

You check on your blog and some lovely person – a stranger- has left a bunch of wonderful comments. This is how God throws little blessings our way.

Today I have been trying to work on a new store I decided to open at Zazzle. It will be my 6th store there and I’ve only just lately been able to wrap my mind around some new fangled ways of creating items (everyone else has known these ‘secrets’ forever it seems) so I wanted to make Blue Hydrangea cards and stamps and hopefully have some additional income from it – eventually.

I worked yesterday on the uploads and started uploading the photos and graphics to the zazzle store and then…..No more zazzle! They went off line. Bummer.

So I checked my mail and found a message sent out from my old (old as in old friend! ha) Pastor in Florida about the upcoming message for Sunday. And I got sad thinking that I would miss it. I pictured all my friends sitting in church listening to a wonderful message and singing those songs I haven’t heard in almost 5 years. I saw that there would be a potluck dinner and an outreach to the homeless and I wanted to call and say I’d be there to help. But I am 1,500 miles away – or something like that.

I moved on in my e-mail and saw that a new person was following me on Twitter and this time it wasn’t some naked sleezy woman! (Don’t you hate those follows?) It was a person who’s blog I had seen a while back. I remembered the name – Red Pine Mountain – so pretty. She has great photos and stories too, but the nicest thing was that she left me a bunch of nice messages about my photos and blog here.

I don’t read too many blogs and I have to skip the “happy home and family” “wonderful life” ones for reasons I won’t bore you with, but I love photos and sometimes I just look at them…and dream. I think that Red Pine Mountain will give me some good dreams and I am grateful for her visit.

Sunrise Pink Sky Photos

On my way back into the house from starting the car this morning, I noticed the sky. As I went in through the slider, my son said “Wow, come look at the sky”.

I told him I’d try to get a photo, but we had to hurry because a pretty sunrise can be gone in an instant. He got his camera and the two of us stood on the deck and got some photos.

A marvelous gift on the first day of Fall.

Then it was off to the bus stop, which is down by the lake – where I thought the sky would be spectacular. Instead a large dark cloud was moving in over the water and blocking out most of the sky.