In a year that will live in infamy, we have lots of reasons to be sick of ourselves. I take solace from reflecting on the countless generations of farmers and hunters who made our existence possible and then melted back into the earth. People with faith in the future made the human world. They knew they would never see us. We can only wonder what they thought we would be like. Perhaps they thought we would be like them.
A long visit from Alex, who lives in Hawaii, did much to redeem the year. It’s important to live in many worlds.
In Hawaii the garden year never ends. The garden year doesn’t really end here either. Cleaning up from the summer is simultaneous with harvesting late crops and planting fall and winter vegetables.
A long visit from Alex, who lives in Hawaii, did much to redeem the year. It’s important to live in many worlds.
In Hawaii the garden year never ends. The garden year doesn’t really end here either. Cleaning up from the summer is simultaneous with harvesting late crops and planting fall and winter vegetables.
Karen and Alex: Fall gardening.
In the fall, large successful insects become careless. The prey is vanishing, the cold is coming, the stakes aren’t as high, so why not fly right out into the open yard and land on a rock? What’s the worst that could happen? We live in a world of protein exchange and as you receive, so shall you give.
A male mantis. Nearly half a foot of dinner for somebody if this careless attitude keeps up.
It was a very poor year for sweet potatoes and yams but various black squash flourished.
Interesting how beautiful these ancient field pea varieties are: the wealth of many forgotten pasts.
Squashes and gourds from Covesville.
When gardening is done, it’s time to take a bath in the ocean. Off to the coast! The temperate Atlantic in the fall is replete with life, and the weather is excellent. We took some of our squash with us. No sense starving. Alan and Don visited.
Terns and Sanderlings.
Fall at the beach.
Alan.
A captive drum, about to be thrown back into the sea.
It was drum season in North Carolina and we voted drum as our favorite eating fish.
This puffer fish washed up dead.
The theme of things that washed up dead or dying seems a little awkward, emotionally. It’s an archetypal beach story though. For instance, Sargassum weed in a range of fall colors, a lot of it over the course of two weeks, suggesting protracted disturbances far out in the Sargasso Sea, the central Atlantic bight.
Sargassum, or Sargasso weed, also turns colors in the fall.
Sargassum bears up under close inspection.
The horseshoe crabs come ashore awkwardly and sometimes permanently, as they have been doing for half a billion years. They’re a sturdy animal on the sea floor, where they can live individually for 20 years or more, but reaching the shore to breed is a serious challenge.
Didn't make it.
Of course some crabs prefer the shore and never leave it.
Ghost crabs will put up their dukes if cornered.
Cannonball jellyfish washed up steadily.
The cannonball jelly.
They kept showing up day after day.
As did the moon jellies.
As did this dangerous siphonophore, the Portuguese man ‘o war.
As did tunicates like this sea grape.
Meanwhile, Cape Hatteras still claims ships and boats.
Once the 'Saucy Mrs. Flobster', now hurricane debris.
The wreck of an old timer, beams in the surf.
Today’s blog is tapering off into mere observation. I’d like to salvage some intellectual content. I guess I’ve mentioned the Great Temporal Sea between where we are, and the time and place of the ancestors—where we came from. I’ve hinted that our temporal sense of seasons, though not entirely arbitrary, is subjective. I referred to the Atlantic Ocean and its denizens, and I began the essay by not saying anything very grateful about the year 2020 O.R. (“Our Reckoning”).
Not everything has cause to complain, however. We are entering a future that looks very bright for so-called jellyfish, very bright indeed. They are going to do extremely well, after all—as they have been doing for more than half a billion years.
With that in mind, it is high time to reconsider what we mean when we say ‘jellyfish’. The English word covers, nondescriptively, a vast host of disparate organisms: Ctenophora, Cnidaria, and our somewhat closer cousins the Tunicata. The tunicates are evolutionarily closer to us than they are to most other so-called jellyfish. Look, folks. Ignorance is not a virtue. Please join me, as an ambition for 2021, in learning our jellies. This is increasingly their world. We merely stand on the shores of it, setting fires.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish
Not everything has cause to complain, however. We are entering a future that looks very bright for so-called jellyfish, very bright indeed. They are going to do extremely well, after all—as they have been doing for more than half a billion years.
With that in mind, it is high time to reconsider what we mean when we say ‘jellyfish’. The English word covers, nondescriptively, a vast host of disparate organisms: Ctenophora, Cnidaria, and our somewhat closer cousins the Tunicata. The tunicates are evolutionarily closer to us than they are to most other so-called jellyfish. Look, folks. Ignorance is not a virtue. Please join me, as an ambition for 2021, in learning our jellies. This is increasingly their world. We merely stand on the shores of it, setting fires.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish
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