Back on the bike, and some thoughts about it

 I got interested in cycling nearly twenty years ago, at the urging of my good friend, Jill, who is a phenomenal athlete. We had some great rides together for quite a few years before she moved on to new adventures in Kansas. That same year, 2011, I started a personal bike challenge to raise some donations for the South Plains Food Bank’s GRUB farm—and I did it to raise money, of course, but also to give me an incentive to stay on the bike after losing a riding partner. It was also the year that my mother died, and because I processed a lot of my grief trying to finish the challenge at the end of the year, I am reminded of her almost every time I ride, even today. 

Neighbor Tim, who knows a lot about bike fitting, gave me free bike fit during my challenge ride after I had complained in a post on another blog (now defunct) about a knee problem, and I often remember this when I ride, too. Ten years later, that fit is still so good that when I clip in, it feels as natural as having a pair of wings must feel to a bird.

I am not sure why I sometimes quit riding. Injuries, lack of time, bad weather all play into it, though, and sometimes I can go for very long periods without getting on the bike. But when I do, I always wonder why I ever stopped. 

I started again briefly during recovery from my hip surgery, I was restricted to doing it on a trainer, however, since I wasn’t allowed to do anything that might cause a fall. But I hate the trainer, and so I quit that as soon as I was able to do other things instead. I would have ridden the bike out on the road then, but I did not yet have the mobility to swing my leg over the top (I used a step ladder to climb on it when it was on the trainer). 

I’ve climbed back on the bike—and the road—during the pandemic (like a lot of people), as a safe way to get some exercise, and part of the joy of it has been all these wonderful memories that have been waiting there for me all along.

In the past, when I was much more serious about it, I avidly followed bike racing. That soured a little with all the doping scandals, though, and I drifted away from it. But I love to watch sports that I play, and I missed it. So I started watching that again, too, for inspiration during the rides on the trainer, and I have continued it. Which brings me to this: Sometime during my long hiatus from watching bike racing, women cyclists finally started to get some parity. Actually, from what I can see, that “sometime” seems to have occurred mostly in the last couple of years. When I stopped watching bike racing, it seemed like you couldn’t find a women’s race _anywhere_ that you could watch. Women’s teams and races existed, but they were always in the shadows, with lousy pay, lousy support, and poor coverage. Now, much to my delight, it seems like that is changing. This Saturday, the first of the spring classics, Omloop het Nieuwasblad, is broadcasting not just the men’s race, but the women’s as well! You can bet I will be watching. And! There is news that Trek Segafredo—a top World Tour team—has decided to give their women’s team the same base pay as the men’s team. And! Another top world tour team, the Dutch team Jumbo Visma, has created a women’s team along with its men’s—at the request of the sponsors! And! For the first time in its 125 year history, the men have decided that women will not permanently damage their childbearing lady parts by riding on cobbles and have allowed them to race the classic Paris-Roubaix (the aptly named “The Hell of the North”).

It’s like I went to sleep for a while and woke up to a new world. 

I don’t know if there is a paywall on this video (I subscribe to Flobikes where you can see the race in its entirety) but if you _can_ watch it, I suggest you give a few minutes of your time to the recent UCI Women’s World Championships of cyclocross (link below). It is impressive stuff. This is just a highlight reel—but they raced at this intensity for over an hour. And if you have ever been someone who has thought women’s sports are not as exciting as men’s, then this is something you need to see. And imagine, it has been in the shadows all this time.

Women’s cyclocross world championships highlights

O frabjous day! In which the cotton project has a surprisingly good day

 It started with my usual 5 AM trip out to the little greenhouse, where I was met with a sad sight. All of the cotton plants are in the process of losing their leaves. However, I could also see new growth on each, and as cotton is a perennial, this gives me hope that even if they do lose their leaves, they may find a way to re-bound.

Leslie at Agrilife agrees. Furthermore, he had this advice for me: cut back on the watering to avoid root rot if they end up dropping all their leaves.

I was out at Agrilife to pick up some bolls that Leslie had cut for me to finish my painting of G.:  

While I was there, I took along the painting series as it is today to showed my progress on the project. It looks pretty good when they are side by side:

After I got back, I threw on some cycling togs and went for a quick spin before lunch, since it was a pretty day. I rode through the drive through at Blue Sky and picked up a cheeseburger on the way home. After that, I changed again and rode the Rivendell to Zhixin Xie’s greenhouse at TTU and checked on the specimens I had taken there two or three weeks as a back up plan. Turns out they not only rode out the storm, they are half again as big as the specimens in my greenhouse (dropping leave notwithstanding). the only difference in the culture for the two groups is the level of heat—the TTU greenhouse is much hotter, and the heat is more consistent—which tells me a lot about what this genus likes:

Winter wheat is doing just fine, thank you, and did not need to fly to Cancun because it was freezing

 After last week’s extreme weather, I wasn’t sure in what condition I would find the winter wheat when the snow and ice finally melted away. Apparently, it is called “winter” wheat for a reason: 

Aftereffects of the winter storm (on the cotton plants)

Where to begin? I really need to start a regular posting cycle to keep up with this adventure. So many things have happened, and I haven’t been good at all at documenting them the way I should. So today I will just dive in with the latest. And going forward, I’ll try to set up a routine—maybe posting each Sunday, and see if not only keeps me caught up, but will also help fill in the many things that have already happened. I am so terrible at discipline and routine, though, that I can’t make any guarantees.

This past week was a doozy in Texas, with record freezing temperatures and snow all over the state, all the way down to Houston. And Texas went dark.

The entire state power grid failed, and much has already been written about the epic (and tragic) disaster that followed, so I won’t go into it. However, Lubbock, in a bit of luck, is not currently on the state grid (though we are scheduled to be starting some time next year), so we never lost power. We are also used to freezing temperatures and the havoc they can wreak, so our city managers were proactive and headed off any disasters. 

But it was still a strain on the system, and so we were asked to conserve energy where we could. Walt and I already keep our thermostats at 68, but we turned them even lower—64° in the back of the house, where my studio and the bedroom are, and 67 in the front of the house (there are two different furnaces, not that it is interesting). 

And in the greenhouse, I turned the thermostat down to 55°. I was hoping this would be enough to keep the plants alive, even though I knew it would put some stress on them. And it did...but I think that some of those single digits days and nights were just too much of a strain. I went out to the greenhouse this morning to check on them, and at least three of the five plants are clearly distressed, so much so that I am pretty sure I am going to lose them. Here is one looking pretty sad:

Fortunately, I had transferred three specimens—a representative of each of the species—to the Dr. Xie’s TTU greenhouse. During the worst of the storm, I was getting notices from the university asking researchers to shut down any parts of their labs that were not required to stay open (to save on energy), and other notices about rolling blackouts. So I texted Xie to asked him if the greenhouses were staying open. He said they were, and sent me a photo the next day of the plants and said they were fine (compare and contrast to the one above). So that is a bit of relief. I will try to go in sometime this week to check on them.

Also, I hope to make a trip out to the Agrilife greenhouse this week, where, I am told, kirkii’s bolls are opening. I have finished the part of that painting of the closed boll (these bolls are pretty small, so I have enlarged the photo). I did two views of it—one with the boll as it normally looks, all wrapped up in its bracts, and one with the bracts pulled away so you can see how unusual the boll is. This will make it slightly different from the other plates, which feature only the open and closed boll. In retrospect, it might have been better to do it the same as the others, and then do a a plate or two comparing the different bolls, without their bracts. Live and learn.

P.S., I have ordered a dual fuel generator so that next time I can keep the greenhouse heated. And there will be a next time. It would be foolish to think otherwise.

Meanwhile, far from the madding crowd: The Cotton Project, Part One

 The past few days in this country have left me dispirited and unable to sleep. So I decided to come here to the blog and post about something good, decent, and non-political in hopes of quieting my soul. 

It’s my habit every morning, shortly after I get up, to go out to the greenhouse to check on the cotton project plants. I haven’t written much about this project on the blog, but in short, it is a series of paintings about different species of cotton that I am working on. Did you know that there are over fifty species in this genus? We tend to use only one for 96% of all commercial production for textiles (Gossypium hirsutum). The other, roughly 4% is Gossypium barbadense, more commonly known as “Pima” cotton. Here are a couple of works in progress—the top one is a commercial variety of hirsutum, and the bottom is barbadense:

I may write more about these two species in the future. Today’s is another story.

Over on the north side of town, Texas A&M has a large research facility, called “Agrilife.” It happens that among other things they do, they have a large seed bank of most of the different species, from all over the world. When we think of a cotton plant, we imagine it looking only one way. But it turns out, the genus is highly varied in its morphology. As a part of the cotton project, I searched around for specimens, and readily found five or six being grown for research. Since we live in cotton country (something like 15% of the world’s commercial cotton is grown here), there is naturally a lot of important cotton research being done in town. But the more esoteric species (read: “not economically useful”) just aren’t available or easily accessible “in the flesh” (that is, I can find photos, but it is hard to do a good botanical painting this way—the live specimen is ideal). Eventually I came to the conclusion that if I wanted specimens to paint, I was going to have to grow them myself.

Now, I am a middling gardener, at best. My garden philosophy goes something like this: “I’ll put you in the ground, get you started, and then you are on your own for the remainder of your natural life.” As you might imagine, this approach has its limits, especially in a land of little rain.

But I do have a greenhouse, albeit one mainly used for overwintering some less hardy cactus. (Cactus are great for gardeners like me, in that they like to be left alone. See also: “Thorns.”) In addition to the greenhouse, I have some garden space with plenty of full sun and drip irrigation, normally devoted to growing tomatoes and peppers. Both of these spaces lend themselves to the possibility of creating my own bijou cotton farmlet. So I decided to order some heirloom seeds—G. hirsutum with colored lint.

But it turns out that you need a permit to grow cotton in Texas, and purveyors outside of the state will not sell you seed without one. I thought at first, incorrectly, that this was driven by the Big Cotton industry, and was all about patents, and GMO, and other scary protectionist things. But as it turns out, it concerns boll weevil eradication. More on this later—my main point is that I needed a permit, and didn’t know where to turn to get one. I had already made some contacts with the researchers at Agrilife, though, and so I reached out and queried them. They immediately pointed me in the right direction, and then said since I wanted to grow some unusual cotton, how would I like to come down there and pick out some candidates from their seed bank? I was told that they needed to be grown in a greenhouse, though, since the plants required controlled light. 

Well, as it happens...

But first (actually, second, since “first” was getting the cotton permit), I needed to get a little more serious about my agricultural set up. This meant plumbing the greenhouse so that I could set up an automatic watering system. Avid readers of this blog (all one of you) know that I am usually a fervent DIYer, but age and some chronic injuries have made me hesitant to tackle some projects on my own. (Also, plumbing almost always turns into a disaster when I try it.) So my neighbor Tim did the plumbing, and Kamron, who occasionally helps me in the garden, dug the trenches. I just signed the checks. It all turned out neat as a pin, with a direct line to both the greenhouse and the hoop house that I also plan to use:

I love this system so much, I should have done it years ago.

Next came the grow lights. Plants, I learned, primarily use the red end of the light spectrum, and modern LED grow lights tend to skew this direction. This turns the little greenhouse into something of an otherworldly sight--a pinkhouse, if you will. The cotton wants more light than that provided by a winter day, so the lights go on at 5 AM, and off again at 8 PM. This is what I see every morning when I go out before dawn to check on my cotton plants:

 

I already had a heater for the greenhouse, though not a very robust one (a new one is on order), and it is controlled by a thermostat. In short, everything is now designed so that I can monitor conditions from my kitchen while wearing my pajamas:

Automated is good when you are an absent-minded, laissez faire gardener such as I (although it turns out that I fret so much about this project, I go out to the greenhouse two or three times a day checking on things; so I probably could have skipped having so much automation). And thus with everything set up, if not to be actually fool-proof, then at least to give me the illusion of such, I went to Agrilife and picked out some seeds.

And that will be my next post.

Shakeout for the Maggie Mee

 Well, what with one thing and another, it was several months after I finished working on the Maggie before I got to take her out on a shakeout cruise. For her first trip, I wanted to go to nearby Caprock Canyon State Park, just a couple of hours up the road. If anything major were to go wrong, I would be close enough to make it back home without too much trouble. However, getting a reservation for a camping spot (at any state park right now) meant booking two months in advance. I dilly-dallied all summer, nervous about traveling during a pandemic. By the time I decided to give it a go, the soonest available time period was the first part of November, which can be dicey, weather-wise. What the heck, I thought, and clicked “send” to book my spot.

As it turned out, the weather was nearly perfect. Moreover, the forecast for night temperatures promised to be cold, but not quite freezing, so I figured that would give me a good opportunity to see how well she performed with a small space heater. I have a good winter sleeping bag, but mummy bags make me claustrophobic, and since the whole reason I decided to embark on the teardrop project was to eliminate as many discomforts associated with camping as possible, I was hoping that a space heater would provide enough heat that I could sleep in my PJs with regular bedding during cold weather.

And the answer to that particular question is that I can.

Other things also worked as well as I had hoped. The stove and galley counter top made cooking and clean up a breeze, even in the dark. Here we are on Taco Night:

The radio did not pick up any nearby stations, but since it is bluetooth capable, I just hooked up my phone and listened to my favorite classical station, KTTZ. I also used the phone as a mobile hotspot and used my iPad for internet access. I’d downloaded some movies onto the iPad as well before leaving and was able to watch them at night (since it was late fall, it got dark at 6:30 in the evening, so I really appreciated having something to do in the confines of the teardrop). My little reading lamp was perfect for reading myself to sleep, too. All the storage space meant everything stayed organized and out of my way. And the first night out there was a fierce windstorm. In a tent, this would have been a problem, but in The Maggie, it was actually soothing to lie there and listen to it. In short, the little camper is nearly perfect for my needs. 

What would make it perfect? Well, an indoor toilet, but that is not going to happen. The park rest rooms were clean and largely unoccupied, though, so it was not too much bother.

The other thing I can’t really fix is having to lie down to get dressed, but I guess I can live with that.

I was feeling a little under the weather for the couple of days I was there, so I didn’t do much more than some light hiking and bird watching. But it was a pleasant, successful trip. 

Cotton notes: Stuff is popping up

 

The helpful people at Texas A&M Agrilife greenhouse, Leslie Wells, Zane Wyatt, Monica Sheehan, and Jane Dever, let me pick out seeds for three different species of cotton, G. aridum, G. nelsonii, and G. therberi. I picked each on the basis of either some story I could tell about them to accompany a painting (nelsonii and therberi), of for the striking difference in how we perceive cotton should look (aridum).

The cotton needs equal hours of daylight and night, so I plumbed my greenhouse for water and added a grow light (more on these later in a greenhouse report), and a couple days ago seedlings started to appear. Time to first the first seed germinated was about seven days. So far, I have at least one specimen per species, but I would like more; I planted at least eight seeds per species, so if more don’t come up, I will try again. Seeds must be given a hot water treatment of 80 C for 90 seconds before planting.

In other news, the winter wheat in the west plot is sprouting. Time to germination was seven days.

Cotton notes: Preparing the farmlet

 I’ve signed a publishing contract for a book about cotton that will be a mix of essays and my botanical art. It’s a long-term project, and I’ve started on it in earnest this fall. There are many things to report, but I’ll start with this, preparing to grow some of my own cotton in the area of the garden I call “the farmlet.” It is the only part of our property that receives full sun, which cotton needs, and normally I use the area to grow vegetables (read: tomatoes and not much else). Next year, however, I am planning to grow some varieties of heirloom cotton to paint. Much to my surprise, when I went to order the seed, I discovered you need a permit to grow cotton in the state of Texas. This is apparently to control the spread of the boll weevil, as this way they can track where it might be. So, with the help of the kind people at Texas A&M Agrilife, I applied for and was granted a permit. 

Next on the agenda was to prepare some space for the plants. In addition to some existing beds in the farmlet, I also decided to add some in the alley, and experiment a bit. I’ve been tagging along with a local farm family as they’ve been harvesting this fall (more on that in another post), and they practice dryland, no-till farming. I thought the alley plots might be a good place  to try these things. So with the help of a young man who often helps me in the garden, we got one bed tilled, and another scraped, and then sowed some winter wheat on the surface to create a cover crop.

 

Which a flock of White Winged Doves promptly devoured. 

I read up a bit on winter wheat and discovered that a 1.5” planting depth is recommended (rather than just scattering it. That seemed like it would keep the birds from feasting on my nascent wheat, so I created some furrows in one bed, scattered the seed, and covered it. I started to do the same to the other bed (the east one), but discovered that is was chock full of lava rocks. You may remember that some years ago, lava rock was a popular landscape mulch. I had forgotten that a long while ago, a friend wanted to get rid of hers and I told her I would take it. Her husband came over with a load of it in the back of his truck and dumped about a cubic yard that spot in the alley. And over the years, I forgot it was there. 

So the past three days I have been digging it out, using a combination of small tiller, various rakes and shovels, and a sieve made from an old garden gate. 

And digging it out. 

And digging it out.

To give you a feel for the scope of this labor, picture if you will a buried swimming pool filled with this:

I figure I have maybe one or two more days of doing this before I can get back to re-planting the winter wheat in this plot. However, while I was distracted by the lava rock dilemma, the doves once again discovered the western plot had new seed—only now it was conveniently lined up in some furrows. 

I came out the morning after I had re-planted and found neat little furrows, as empty as could be. They all looked like this:

It was sort of like an Automat for birds.

So I re-re-planted the winter wheat, covered it again, and then covered the whole thing with bird nettting. And that seems to have done the trick.

Further notes: the seed comes from a local seed company, and Kamron, my farmlet hand, had to buy an entire bag. So there is plenty to do all the re-planting I need.

 

Meanwhile...

So much has happened since I left off and I have no idea where to begin. I will just start with something.

Back in the spring covid shut everything down, it looked as if I would not be able to travel to the TransPecos with the Maggie Mee to work on the devils claw project. Parks were closed, travel was scary, and it seemed prudent to hunker down. But all was not lost. Botanist Michael Eason—author of Wildflowers of Texas and with whom I have consulted on this project—sent me some seedpods for two species of Proboscidea, louisianica ssp. ‘fragrans’ and altheaifolia. I spent an evening with a couple pairs of pliers wrestling the seeds from their grasp and planted them. This was difficult, as the seedpods did not want to give them up. Nevertheless, I persisted, with a little cursing, and eventually got more than enough to plant. (Fragrans is shown here with some seeds from a Native American cultivar of parviflora, to illustrate the difference in seed color.)

As it turned out, it as a good thing I had so many seeds, because, as was the case last year, I had a dickens of a time getting them to germinate. I did, however, get one specimen of each. I’m going to talk about them in separate posts, however, otherwise This will get to be too long. Suffice it to say that it took some effort to get both these plants to survive, bloom, and set fruit.

Altheaifolia is unusual in that, unlike the other species of Proboscidea, it is a perennial. This was going to present a problem with our winters here in the panhandle, since its natural habitat is much further south. So I planted it in a lightweight pot with the intention of moving it into the small greenhouse I have to overwinter. Here it is as an infant, looking alarmingly (to my eyes) fragile, spindly, and ready to succumb to all that life can throw at it: 

It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that I held my breath the entire summer hoping this plant would survive.

But survive it did, and grew, though it was somewhat leggy compared to one grown in the wild. Michael Eason suggested this might be because it did not get enough sun, and that seems likely, since I had grown it in part shade in order to hook it up to some automatic drip I already had there.

It also did not bloom all summer. But since it is a perennial, I wasn’t too worried, thinking it might be more likely to next summer.

And now here it is Fall. I moved the altheaifolia into the greenhouse about a month ago, and lo and behold, the extra sun and warmth there coaxed a bloom! And then another! And there are four additional buds growing on the stems. 

The flower is a striking color—sort of Indian Yellow, with shades of purple. It will be nice to paint it. I learned from the fragrans this summer that though the Proboscidea are self-pollinating, I did not seem to have the right pollinator for the plant to bear fruit. So I helped it along with the paint brush, with good success. I worried about the same being true with the altheaifolia, so I did the same: 

I’ll post updates on the plant as it progresses.

Tomorrow is predicted to be our first freeze, but the greenhouse heater is working, and everything is buttoned down, so hopefully the plant will be happy and continue blooming and produce some fruit.

Naturalist Notebook: Putting things in perspective

Ok, here's the thing: Perspective is simple...and it's not. Like many things, once you understand the principles, it is easy to sketch something without using all the "rules." Or conversely, once you understand those principles--and a  few more--you can make a perspective drawing as complicated as your heart's desire.

But to get you started, I'm going to break it down as simply as I can.

First, if we look at a person standing at the end of a street, a block away, that person appears smaller than if he is standing right beside us. We know this to be true. It is also true of an object, like, say, a box. If we are very close to the box, then we might not see that the far end appears slightly smaller than the near end, but it does. If we were to draw the box with all sides equal, it would look funny to us. This is called "orthographic projection":

It almost looks as if the box is trying to fall forward, off the page--an optical illusion. But if we draw the box so that the measurements on the far side are smaller--in perspective--the box looks less odd, and more like it is sitting on the ground. Here are the two ways of drawing the box, side by side:

This is a classic example of the tension between drawing what we know to be true (all sides equal) and what we see (things in the distance appear smaller).

To learn to draw things in perspective, it helps to go through some exercises to see how to draw a box from different angles. First, you must imagine that there is a horizon in the distance, and that if something is actually on this horizon, it is so far away and small that you cannot see it anymore. This is called the "vanishing point" (abbreviated in these diagrams as "V.P."). If you place a box in front of you, looking at it straight on, and you could imagine that you could scoot it back toward that horizon line, it would grow smaller and smaller, until finally it "vanished." It would look something like this, which is called "single point perspective":

You will notice that I have drawn guidelines from the front of the box (shaded) all the way back to a single point on the horizon--the vanishing point--and then drawn a horizontal line across those guidelines to represent the back of the box. After that, it is easy to connect the top front of the box to the top of the back of the box with two solid lines, et voila', I have drawn a box in perspective.

But we don't always look at boxes (or buildings, or sidewalks, or fence lines...) straight on. Usually, in fact, we are looking at them from one side. When we do this, we have effectively turned the box so that we now have two vanishing points--one for one side of the box that we can see, and another for the other side that we can see. It looks like this:

How extreme the perspective is depends on how far apart we place the vanishing points:

If we want our sketches to look "normal" we probably won't have room on our pages to place the vanishing points, so we have to imagine where they are, off the page.

I have drawn all these images from the viewpoint of looking down on the box. I've drawn them this way for clarity in illustrating how to use the guidelines to draw the boxes. But we seldom see things from this viewpoint (unless we are high in a neighboring building, or standing on top of a hill). More often the horizon line is "eye level." And we also draw other things besides buildings in perspective. Suppose, for example, we were to plant one tree at each corner of a box, and then look at the placement of these trees in perspective? Here is what that "box of trees" looks like, looking at them from both eye level, and from above:

This has real life applications, as shown by this sketch by a former student in this class, Jay Daniel, of the trees in the English/Philosophy courtyard:

These are the most basic rules of perspective drawing, and once you grasp them, it suddenly becomes easier to see the objects you are drawing in perspective. After you have practiced using guidelines a few times, you will find you seldom need the anymore. However, there are occasions when it helps to use them to draw things that are more complex than simple boxes. For example, you can use guideline to draw evenly spaced fenceposts or trees:

To draw the shadows falling from trees:

And so on. It turns out that artists have been playing with ways to draw very complex scenes in perspective for centuries. But it wasn't until 15th Century that Italian artist and engineer Fillipo Brunelleschi codified the laws for all the rest of us. Leonardo da Vinci, another artist/engineer. was also famous for his complex perspective drawings:

If you are a person who likes puzzles, or making order out of complexity, I urge you to find a book on perspective and start playing around with this ancient art. Or, if you just want to be able to sketch a street scene and not have it look like it is falling off the page, practice until you get a feel for the basics, and then throw out the guidelines. Either way, have some fun.

Look around. Everything you see is follows the principles of perspective. Sidewalk lines. Houses lining a street. Mailboxes in the front yard. People sitting at a dining room table. Life itself.

Naturalist Notebook: Thought exercises

I think sometimes that people are afraid to write in their journals because they don’t know what to write. Or perhaps they think that what they write has to be fully formed, or grand, or flowery—something special. That can be really intimidating, and it is one of the reasons I have placed so much emphasis on simply recording our observations. But the observations are really just the foundation for our experiences in nature. It is a wasted opportunity if we don’t use them to shape our understanding of the world.

One way to get past the intimidation factor is to set up simple thought exercises for ourselves. For example, in my garden, I sometimes find fox scat (poop), and it is almost always on some elevated structure, like a garden stone. So I could just record the presence of the scat and that would be that. But I could also ask myself some questions about it. Why, for example, is it often on an elevated structure? This is different from what I have observed about coyote scat, which I tend to find in the middle of a trail. I would write these observations and questions down in my journal. I don’t have to know the answer—it is enough to have the questions. I can speculate on answers, though. For example, I have often hypothesized that the coyote leaves his scat in the middle of the trail to mark it as his territory. Perhaps it is the same for the fox in my garden. If it is in the middle of the trail or on top of a rock, it is certainly noticeable, after all. I would write these speculations down, too. Later on, when I have access to the internet or a library, I might try to find the answer. Surely somebody has studied this.

You can take this even farther though, as poet Pattiann Rogers does in what she calls a “poem of supposition.” Rogers rescued a baby cardinal one day and returned it to his father. Afterward, she began to wonder how her view of the world might have been shaped if she had been a baby cardinal, and the bright red color of his father was the color of safety, shelter, food, and life itself. If red is so important to the baby cardinal’s life, would it then influence how he sees all the red in the world?

So Rogers wrote a poem about this, “Suppose your Father was a Redbird” (“Redbird” is a colloquial name for cardinals). Below is a link to Roger’s poem in its entirety. Please read it and come back here for a discussion. I’ll wait. 

Suppose your Father was a Redbird

She begins the poem with a close, detailed observation of the father bird, as seen by the baby, and describes watching the father fly off. At first, in the stanza below, she describes the miracle of watching the father’s wings unfurl from his body, transforming him into something else—something that can fly. Then as he flies away, you watch him eagerly, hopefully—because, remember, your whole life depends on the red color of his body returning:

Suppose, before you could speak, you watched

The slow spread of his wing over and over,

The appearance of that invisible appendage, 

The unfolding transformation of his body to the airborne.

And you followed his departure again and again,

Learning to distinguish the red microbe of his being

Far into the line of the horizon.

How then, would this desperate searching for the red microbe--this red miracle--shape how you see everything else? Rogers speculates:

Then today you might be the only one able to see

The breast of a single red bloom

Five miles away across an open field.

In other words, because you have been studying the color of red since birth, because it is important to your survival, you are so finely tuned to the color of red that you can see a single bloom of a red flower five miles away.

Go back now and re-read the poem with this understanding. I’ll wait.

Rogers ends the poem with the point of it all, the prize for taking a supposition to its conclusion, the thing you can take to your heart and from which you can learn:

If your father was a redbird,

Then you would be obligated to try to understand

What it is you recognized in the sun

As you study it again this evening

Pulling itself and the sky in dark red

Over the edge of the earth.

Maybe it seems a little unclear why this is the prize, but here, too, we can speculate. Why, for example, are we humans drawn to sunsets? Is there something in it that we are obligated to understand that we have forgotten?

I like these supposition exercises. They don’t have to be written as poetry, though I think it is fun to try that. The purpose of them, though, is to make us look more deeply at what we have observed. Why don’t you try something like this? Go to your backyard or a park and make some observations. Then start asking yourself a series of questions. The questions should lead you toward looking at the world through a different lens—one that is not your usual way of seeing. And then, the ultimate question: with this new way of seeing, how are you obligated to understand the world?