Sometimes, the majesty of these mountains we call home can take your breath away. The sense of history, both manmade and geological is all around us. A simple drive can take you back to another time. I think because most of us are involved with the activities of day to day living, we tend to forget just how special this place is. As you go about your business today, take a moment to consider just how lucky we are.

(Note to Earlene L. and Georgia H. – I received your comments, but they were garbled. Please resend them, and thanks for visiting my blog.)

I don’t know if the seemingly inordinate number of morning spider webs I’ve been seeing lately means anything, like a hard winter, early frost, or anything like that, but they make some cool photos. Here are a couple for your perusal.

The Grits Mess

Anne tends to eat healthier than I do, particularly when it comes to breakfast. She favors whole grain cereal and fruit or juice, while I prefer a more cholesteral laden country breakfast. On those rare occasions when she does have something sturdier in the morning, it’s usually the grits mess, a creation she credits to her Uncle Mac. You start with a bowl of grits and add whatever you wish to it. Eggs, cheese, sausage, bacon, ham, onions, peppers, mushrooms, whatever blows your hair back.

When I went back to college after the army, I joined the Vets Club, a fraternity like social/service organization of military veterans who, like me, had returned to school to complete their education. We did good work, volunteering in a number of areas to benefit the school and local community. We also partied……hard. Some of our parties were legendary, like the time Anne and several other wives mooned the governor, senator, and state attorney general of North Carolina. Parties aside though, we were a fairly responsible group. We used designated drivers long before it was the fashion. And we generally ended our parties with a grits mess, one that included all of the ingredients listed above and then some. If you’ve never tried a grits mess, I highly recommend one.

One of the least pleasant aspects of country life is the variety and number of critters with whom we often share our humble little cottage. For the first couple of Decembers  when I came down for the weekend, I found the place overrun with mice and ladybugs. The mice I expected, but the hundreds of ladybugs, both living and dead were a surprise.

Other parts of the year bring all manner of flying insects, ants, naturally, fleas, ticks, and one of my very favorites: wood roaches. The sight of one in the house causes Anne to display that most Southern of conditions known as the “hissy fit”, and the pile of mulch next to the house is full of them. {Note to self: Make sure they dump the next pile further from the house. Better yet, hire someone to distribute the stuff as soon as it is delivered.}

Our current plague seems to be spiders. I’m not talking about black widows or brown recluses, the ones that can turn your switch off permanently if you’re not careful. I’m talking about your average, run of the mill webslinger, the kind that, overnight, can spin a web the size of a pickup truck in the bathroom. Now, intellectually I know that spiders are very beneficial to the control of other insects, and that we shouldn’t kill them indiscriminately. And I don’t as long as they stay outside. I’ve watched the spider in the picture above work on that web for two days now. The architecture of a well built spiderweb is one of nature’s engineering miracles, and this one looks particularly well done.

But, should the little dude who built that beauty decide to move inside, it’s squash-city for him. I’ve been bitten by spiders twice in the last four years. Both times at night while I was asleep, and both hurt like the dickens when I awoke. They also took several months to heal and left permanent scars. So my live and let live policy with the natural world doesn’t apply to spiders in the house. I take no chances, and I take no prisoners.

Here are a few comforting thoughts. No matter where in the world you are, you’re usually no more than six feet from a spider.  And those daddy long-legs we used to let crawl on us as kids….those daddy long-legs have a very dangerous venom, one of the most dangerous venoms to humans. Luckily, their mandibles (jaws) aren’t strong enough to break our skin. Now, isn’t that special?

It’s been raining for better than 36 hrs., and man did we need it. Things were starting to get a little dry. We had to cut back on watering the garden, because our water comes from an underground spring, and the water level was getting low. I spent an hour or so on the porch during the most intense part of this morning’s heavy shower listening to the rain playing a drum solo on the tin roof, and taking some rain photos. See the streaks of rain behind the pine on the one above?

Below is a shot of the water pouring out of a disconnected downspout. I had planned on having a whiskey barrell in place to collect the water for use in the garden. The operative word here is planned.

Finally, the streaks of rain and the muted light make this last photograph of the tumbled-down shed across the way, appear almost as if it were an impressionist painting. Notice the kudzu snaking its way up to the power line.

The biodiversity of our little domain makes it a microcosm of the mountains themselves. The cottage sits in a holler on a little ridge at the bottom of a much bigger ridge overlooking a mini-valley with Galena Creek and a wildflower meadow at the bottom. The land behind the house slopes upward to Chesnut Ridge and is heavily forested. There are several biomes at work here. Biomes are what most of us have erroneously referred to as ecosystems. Science is constantly redefining its terminology it seems. It is the inhabitants of these biomes that have been the focus of my attention of late. I take a photo of a flower or an insect and go to the web to try to properly identify it. One link leads to another link and, well, we’ve all been there. The search for knowledge is often more rewarding than the attainment of knowledge. I’ve learned a little Latin and a bit about order and species and strata and other things I slept thru in school.

I tell you all this in order to justify showing you another bug picture. This one.

Meet Calopteryx Maculata, the Ebony Jewelwing Damselfly. Damselflies are very similar to dragonflies. They both eat mosquitoes and flies and other small insects. The difference has to do with the wingstructure, the eyes and yada, yada, yada. Sometimes a bug is just a bug. This one happens to have a striking appearance and I was able to get a pretty good shot of it.