Opera Parva Naturae NewJersiensis

aka Small Works of Nature as seen in New Jersey!

HP is arguably a small work of nature, since he describes himself as a "wee ugly Scot" and we see him here triumphantly sitting on the patio enjoying a wonderful Sunday afternoon of sunshine, birds, watching me work in the garden, reading and generally acting like he's on vacation.

The three part ramp finally arrived, and allowed me to get his huge reclining wheelchair out, via the patio door, over a two inch obstacle, doesn't take much to stop a wheelchair, and he enjoyed his time in the air wonderfully, is sleeping it off even as we speak...

Other small works were on the patio: the first radish of the season, promptly eaten by HP three seconds after the picture was taken....and then there are the lovely seedpods, tiny, beautiful, like miniature honesty seedpods, from the yellow alyssum, and the little blue flowers whose name escapes me every single year, but who only have to be out briefly for bees and clearwing hummingbird moths and other small works of nature to show up and play in them.

Wonderful Sunday in June, perfect weather, who could ask for more...and I'm reading a couple of delicious Olivia Goldsmiths too, beach type reading, great fun, happy endings, the bad guys get theirs, and the good women get their rewards -- as Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell would say, clearly a work of fiction!

In a much more serious but just as readable vein, I'm reading Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook, which I hugely recommend, as a wonderful appreciation of the craft and skill and art of poetry, with all kinds of insights that really make you run to the poem itself to see what she means. Not written to puff up the writer, such a refreshing change in the world of English Lit. She touches with a light hand on the history of poetry as well as what to look for in a poem, why it works and doesn't.

No use quoting from here, I'd end up quoting the entire work, you just have to be there.

I'm not always a great aficionado (or aficionada, to be exact) of this art form, loving a few poets very much and not being much up for a lot of others, but this book is enough to wake up a lot of energy about poems. Five stars! Multae Stellae! since I can't remember the Latin word for five....it being a while since I was in Latin America.