Final Days of June

On the bird feeder, a red wing blackbird!  They aren't rare, but I've never had one in the garden, and I was excited.  Little things.  :)  

I continue the ongoing battle with aphids and their attraction to my milkweed plants.  Having tried the soapy water (finally, even adding a little Neem oil), the most efficient method of destroying the little buggers seems to be examining the plants daily and using my garden gloves, smushing them by hand.  Now, I'm going to have to try diatomaceous earth, which I've recently read about.  Last year was the first time they became a problem, but I really want them to leave my milkweed plants alone.  

"Young nymphs increase gradually in size and within a week give birth to many more nymphs....
Most aphids, except for the sexual forms, do not have to mate in order to reproduce, and they produce live young, rather than eggs."  Source

Why it is so important to me to keep my milkweed plants healthy:  Pollinator Cities Really Could Save the Monarachs.

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Two of my favorite people:  daughter Erin and long-time friend Ren.  They make me laugh-- both of them are witty and funny.

Erin and Ren

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I love words and on Naomi's blog she mentions some of the words for rain in Scotland:  

"Musical, melodic words like spindrift (spray whipped up by the wind) and aftak (an easing or lull in a storm or rain). Hilarious, fun-to-say words that you’d swear were made up, like drookit (absolutely drenched) and daggle (to fall in torrents).

And words that seem to be plucked straight out of a Scottish novel, transporting you through time and space to a place where “wild” still holds meaning, and ghosts in tartan haunt your imaginings. Yillen (a shower of rain, especially with wind), uplowsin (heaving rain), smirr (a fine rain drizzle), and goselet (a soaking, drenching, downpour)."

We've had some goselets here lately, but my favorite is spindrift--as long as I'm inside, that is.   

The many Scottish descriptions of rain kind of reminds me of Smilla's Sense of Snow.

   

 And somewhere I found this Swedish word:

Gokotta--The act of waking early in the morning with the purpose of going outside and listening to the first birds sing."  

How specific and concise! 

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Mail

from Connie

:) she used one of the old envelopes she found

Below I used an image Connie sent me 

on a postcard "Thank You" to Bryce Eleanor--the cat-lady-in-training.

 to niece Maggie, also a cat and animal lover

back

This is worth a smile.

Mail and Stuff

*Mail

Outgoing

Postcards

My niece moved to Texas.

 one letter

*More words with no direct translation to English:

Germany: verschlimmbesserung [versh-lim-bess-air-oong]

To make things worse by trying to improve them.  (Oh, boy, do I recognize the meaning of this one!  Can't really pronounce it, but it perfectly describes certain situations.)

Portugal: saudade - noun

1. (in Portuguese folk culture) a deep emotional state of melancholic longing for a person or thing that is absent:the theme of saudade in literature and music.

(There are a number of songs and melodies that evoke this feeling for me.  Music does tend to have vivid connections in memories.)

*Books/Reading--finished Val McDermid's Broken Ground and Kate Atkinson's Transcription.  Both are good, but I haven't reviewed them yet.  

Hiraeth

I love words and have a wide reading vocabulary, but my spoken vocabulary is limited.  Sadly limited.  I'm frequently reduced to describing a common object:  "Please hand me that...thing with a handle."  When the girls were little, I said things like, "You with the freckles."  Knowing the definitions of words and being able to call them up when I need them is a paradox that frustrates me.  

 Every once in a while, I find a foreign word that so aptly describes a feeling or emotion, but has no English translation.

I read an article in The Guardian several weeks ago that had this paragraph: 

 "There is a Welsh word, hiraeth, which means something like a longing of the soul to come home to the place where your spirit lives. I’m pretty sure there is no Yorkshire term that expresses the same idea – it’s a little too lyrical for Yorkshire –but it is a word that I understand innately, and a yearning that is present in most of the characters I have ever created: home sometimes a tangible place, sometimes a psychological one."  (source)

Definition:  hiraeth m (uncountable)

1. homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, or for a home which may have never been
2. an intense form of longing or nostalgia, wistfulness
3. the grief for the lost places of your past    (source)

I wondered how to pronounce it and found these three similar versions.  Will I ever use this word in conversation?  Probably not, but I love it anyway and have added it to a list of foreign words that have no  precise English synonym but which describe an emotion we all recognize. 

----Hiraeth will make a great art journal entry.   My mind is accumulating a number of places I've longed for over the years (and still do, of course):  the porch swing at my maternal grandmother's house, the "sleeping porch" at my paternal grandparents' home, a valley filled with purple loosestrife in the Montana Rocky Mountains that enchanted my six-year-old self as I sat on a boulder looking down at the field of purple....  Wow, the list goes on and on.

How about you?