Red, red robin takes a bow

The European robin, to be exact.  Which is a totally different sort of bird from the American robin.  Europeans, on being told that pigeon-like thing with the pink chest is a robin, say, never!  that's a pigeon with a pink chest.  Real robins are tiny, very bold and friendly, sit on your spade while you're gardening, or maybe on your hat.  They are winter birds, and feature on many a British Christmas card, sitting on a snowy log.

The naming confusion is all the fault of the Pilgrims, who were as good at birds and botany as they were at getting along with and appreciating native Americans.  I'm guessing they were mainly townsfolk, though I haven't researched this.  They certainly named things at random.  A bird with a pink chest might as well be called a robin.

And there's the goldfinch, the American version of which, brilliant yellow and black spring plumage, I know very well because it's the state bird of NJ.  But the goldfinch of Donna Tartt's brilliant novel of the same name, looks nothing like it.

 

Turns out that's the European, original, goldfinch.  See him, peeking out? And the European concept around the goldfinch is that it represents the soul.  Which gives a whole other meaning to that novel, which I recommend highly you read, if you haven't already.  It's not about birds, except very indirectly, it's a massive quest and adventure and all sorts of events.

You need to read it in print, not audio, though, because there are passages you whip through, so exciting, to find out what's next, and passages you linger over because they're so packed with meaning you need to address them that way.  Audiobooks have one failing, that they are read totally at the same speed throughout, destroying the dramatic impact of good writing as often as not.  But better than no access, I guess.

 Likewise the settlers',  we're back to the settlers, plant naming, it's good thing we have the Latin true names, because they really fell down on that one.

I was pretty good at botany as a kid in the UK.  It's more or less a requirement.  On Girl Guide hikes, our leader would say, name me the first ten plants we see out here on this moor.  And everyone could.  There was no what's this little green thing? or well, it's a little white flower, no, we knew our plants.  So I had to relearn a whole lot when I moved to the US.  My time in France wasn't much of a botanical education, the French people I knew having zero knowledge of, or interest in, botany.  Not much call for it in the high rent district of Paris.

But, aside from having different vegetation here, other than the plants John Tradescant stole and brought back to England for his boss, Lord Cecil, Elizabeth First's right hand man on state affairs and the treasury, which from then on we counted as English plants, such a nerve, there was a lot to learn.

The preceding paragraph, which is one sentence, is witness to a heavy Latin education, the periodic style, with subordinate clauses sticking out all over, but it makes sense if you stay with it.

One of the great blessings of not growing up with poison ivy, (now we're back to plants, I feel as if there should be a helpful voiceover in this blogpost), for instance, it being rare to nonexistent where I lived, is that you don't develop sensitivity to it until you've been exposed a few times.

So I was able to uproot and toss it at will, to the horror of my neighbors, who expected me to collapse quite soon.  And one of them refused to come into my living room until I removed a lovely vase of wild flowers and weeds, including a bunch of poison ivy, which I had thought pretty enough to pick.  She said if she even brushed against it, she'd be one big rash.

Wonderful discoveries about plants and trees, like the sassafras tree with the three kinds of leaves, very exciting stuff for me.  

My mid morning fruit break.  Looks seasonal, somehow.  The star motif gets in everywhere.

Current reading, highly recommended, is Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. 

I heard of her yesterday for the first time, and already I'm deep into this novel. It's a quest novel, on very humble lines, with a kind of accidental pilgrim, Harold of the title, in search of connection, and learning a lot on the way.  It's very much Canterbury Pilgrims in its way of introducing interesting characters, vignette style, and their stories, except that Harold's is a lone pilgrimage.

In some ways, it's a much abbreviated take on the sort of quest in the Goldfinch, except it's a quest for human connection rather than a masterpiece of painting and its symbolism.  

Anyway, back to the Great Me, I've been getting a lovely lot of greetings, emails, ecards, texts and general good wishes today.  Lovely day.  Sunny, nothing on the calendar other than lazing about. 

I'll take it!