mystery

home of the Ellen and Geoffrey Fletcher mysteries

Surge.

Apr 24

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Here and there, the business of spring getting done.

New arbor for the remote rose,

replacing the rotting and crumbled wooden slats
with a mosaic firefly top.

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The glassy glint from the gravel under foot,
was a thumb-sized hunk of mica
that sheared into a hundred pieces at a touch.

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The older bloom of the kitchen amaryllis.

The new bloom.

Little violets in the grass, in patches here and there.

The queen of weeds, ruling a million sister blooms.

Plum gnarly.

Several human spirits are trapped under the bark,
rather lumpy spirits.

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Eats, shoots, and leaves.

Apr 24

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It was a hard freeze, down to 26°F,
but just for a few hours.
A little damage, that could have been much worse.

Crab apple blooms burned, but not blasted,
abuzz today with pollinators.

Pansies in the pot, okay.

Oxeyes, or hawksbeard, is everywhere.

Swampwort, singular.

Swampwort, plural.

Early rising mayapple,
first of the millions to come.

Herb garden just after takeoff,
landing gear tucked up, and ready for the long flight.

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Peat pellet hatchlings.

Hostas strangely enthusiastic,
as if they knew — something.

Camera killing azalea blossoms one week from full flower
also survived the freeze.

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Cluster of pear blossoms, likewise unperturbed.

Up the orchard, all the relics that remain,

some in flower first, some in leaf first,
all accept the swell of spring.

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Spring back, fall forward.

Apr 10

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Yesterday, snow blew down all afternoon, all night
with wind louder than jets,
like freight trains colliding overhead;
and last night the temperature bottomed at 26°F
for an hour or two.

Today it was sunny and 62°F, to make a mowing and pruning Sunday.

But for our transient little turkey clutch,
the proof of spring,
is the mating dance, display full-on.

A couple days ago, before the freeze,
Tom was grazing solo, a little shy,
hoping for a little cracked corn.

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Today he’s pumped
but the three hens he brung
have drifted off to clean up under the feeders.

So, all this is for me.

You got your chest fluffed, your back ruff raised,

your wattle blood red, your whole head a rather freaky blue,

wings down, pumping and dragging, the beard atremble,

tail feathers high, wide spread and snappy

all while wings brushing the ground,
gobbble-gobbling sweet nothings.
An’ he could he would perform all these at once.
But he has to settle for two or three
rotating through his display menu.

Meanwhile a mini-Monarch moth,
about an inch each way

has lit to prove spring’s here to stay.

No more frosts, no more freezes,
no more wintery mix.

Just the spring.
April is the cruelest month,
if you don’t know,
ask the blueberry bushes.

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The boys in the band are giving it away.

Apr 6

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2013-06-01_17-59-31_762

¡EBOOKS FREE!

from the Ellen and Geoffrey Fletcher Mystery series

For five days in April 2016, the 7th to the 11th, Thursday through Monday

Free from Amazon.com (the cover pictures below are links), available only in Kindle format.

If you haven’t got a Kindle Device, one will be appointed for you.
Amazon sends a drone to your home (they know when you are sleeping)
that upgrades your dishwasher, and installs Kindle-reader aps on all your computers, tablets,
and mobile phones (totally free of charge).
This modest incursion opens access to hundreds thousands of titles, not just mine.

Kindle Direct Publishing invites authors on their platform to trade income for exposure and offer their books for free every few months. It’s a simultaneous worldwide deal on all the Amazon stores (US, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, India, Australia, Japan, Mexico, Brazil). The marketing idea is that people will take a chance on free stuff who wouldn’t pay for a book from an unknown author. And the theory works every time: free books in trade for free exposure.

Let me know what you think: favorable comments warm the heart,
unfavorable ones teach the necessary lessons.
Comment here, or email me at mystery@budcrawford.com.

FitToCurve

The Asheville Story.

Heart Attack

The Williamsburg Story.

Here are a few comments from readers
from favorable reviews on Amazon
.

    Fit to Curve is a skillfully written mystery with complex characters and such a fascinating plot that I’m way behind on my chores.

    This series is a favorite with interesting plots and wonderfully drawn characters. Wish the author would write more of them. The type of book you don’t want to end.

    A bed and breakfast mystery. Super characters, well developed. You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. A mouth-watering, good read. Love the old lady with the sharp wit. I’d like the recipes, too.

    The plot builds very slowly. But once I got into it, I was hooked. I liked the characters, and you get a lot of insight into them.

    This is too fine a novel to be mired in the mystery/suspense ghetto. It’s a good mystery, with a complex plot, all the mystery trappings, but the characters are rounded and attractive. The theme seems to me to be a consideration of morality – not just sexual morality (or immorality), though there’s some of that too, for those who like to read such descriptions, but all kinds of morality: for how high a price might you sell your soul?

    Heart Attack is a great read!

    This couple are a great addition to the mystery genre. Sharp and interesting with a bit of humor and spice.

    Snappy dialog. Geoff and Ellen are a great team. He has a definite intuitive method of assessing info and arriving at conclusions that baffle and irk his cohorts. Ellen is more conventional and together are a great team. Unusual mystery not easily solved.

COMING SOON:

Ghost Walk sample                                                                                                                               Little Fishes sample

GhostWalk

The Charleston Story: seeking agent

 

Little Fishes

The Atlanta Story, editor ready

Snow dusted cusp.

Mar 21

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Stepping forward and back over the equinox.

Full bloom yesterday.

Half way to full.

Bulbs are up & out.

And perennials are being what they are.

The herb sagacious.

While randomly walking by,
our cracked corn tom, proves as camera shy as huge.

Brought inside to save them from the frost.

We had to kill them to save them,
though it did not hurt us more.

This way we may enjoy their last days close up.

Four inches of snow fell here today:
the first two vanished as they landed,
the third sank slowly into the ground,
but the fourth covered everything
as the temperature fell under freezing.

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Moss invasive.

Mar 14

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You expect moss in the woods, on rocks,

here and there.


And along the branch


where conditions are right.


Or by the house on the stack


of old chimley stones.


But it’s spreading under the Chinese Chestnut trees


and in wide swathes,


hundreds, thousands, of square feet.

Grass will argue in some places,
but the grass has surrendered in most places.

Not exactly new this year, but accelerated,
from decades of not spreading lime,
or from some fresh factor,
from changes in the climate?

It’s soft and pretty and can’t be mowed,
ideal for a graveyard.

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Waking.

Mar 13

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The planted bulbs are up,
each clump in turn as ordered by the hours of sunlight.
You can almost see the bee.


The buds at the branch tips


are set to explode,


some into flowers first,


some first into leaves.


Once a peach, this stump’s done,
the trunk become new wood for carving or for fire.


Blessed by a working bee.

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On the cusp.

Feb 28

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The bulbs push shoots up, invisible until they blow apart.

The lichen population is not impressed by spring stirrings.

Boiling, freezing, drought or flood, they’re good, they’re perpetual.

On the shadow side, north facing, the last snow patch lingers.

The branch roars, swollen from the recent rain and the recent snow.

Passing cataracts and icicles,

from the twin springs just below the ridge, down this far,
down to the branch, on to the Mississippi, to the Gulf.

The crocus bulbs have called spring!

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The light stripey ones,

delicate and bright,

already sticking to the bee’s knees as she crawls inside

to work, drunk on the golden pollen.


The deep purple clump


And the grandest bloom of all,

serene, imperial,
except for the pollen knocked around her ankles.

Rapture and ravishing.

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The oath sworn by Shakepeare’s dad.

Feb 27

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Chugging along through a new biography of Wm Shkspr the other night
(a neat concept, speculative essays by serious scholars
going beyond what little is really known and filling in the blanks imaginatively
using the most recent discoveries
about his life and times)
I was struck by this paragraph,
in the chapter about William’s father, John,
the last line.

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A phone photo of a Kindle page, it’s a little fuzzy.

It’s about the oath of office for the office of Bailiff
that John was required to swear.

The line that got me reads:

“His oath of office was ‘to the uttermost of your cunning,
wit and power to maintain and defend  the liberties
of the same borough and shall do
equal right as well to the poor as to the rich.'”

Let’s bring this back.

cunning, wit and power
equal right as well to the poor as to the rich

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That one plant.

Feb 27

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Most of the year an amaryllis is dormant,
doesn’t need water, doesn’t need light.
One by one they wake
of a sudden thirsty for water and for light.

They push out a leaf, or a few leaves,
and push up a center stalk absurdly tall
with a bulb the size of a human fist.

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Sometimes there are two bulbs and two huge showy flowers open.

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Just for kitchen company,
a rare blue Valentine’s Day orchid.

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This plant flowered two weeks
before any of the others woke up,
in defiance of last week’s snow.
Necessarily one of them has to be first,
not infrequently way before the rest.

Like the dove let loose from the ark,
looking for enough muddy ground to build a nest;
or, for the amaryllis, sufficiency of sunshine.

Orchid blooms blue and precious beyond imagining

unless it’s from food coloring.

The little buds will tell.

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Direct links.

Feb 8

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Testing a new Amazon option, straight (er?) to them:

 

FitToCurve

SONY DSC

Just hit the back arrow to return here.

Racoon redux.

Feb 1

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“I keep giving her food,
why doesn’t she go away?”

Turns out that is not how you get rid of a stray cat.

Or a resident racoon.IMG_20160131_230254438

There’s feed on the rail, lots of food.IMG_20160131_230241623_TOP

You just reach up and pull. Tilt and spill.
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I’m getting way too wonderfully plump
to slither away in escape like this.
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Why do you keep interrupting my dinner?
Eating is an every day business.
It’s a mammal thing.

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Great Smokin’ Park.

Feb 1

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The Great Smokies National Park
is a smushed oval, about three times as wide (E-W) as high (N-S),
half in North Carolina and half in Tennessee.

Also the oldest and most visited of all the parks,
and the largest one, east of the Mississippi.
There’s no charge to enter.

Highway 441 cuts up the middle,
running 35 miles from Cherokee, North Carolina to Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

Newfound Gap is the high point of Highway 441
and also the lowest mountain pass through the Smokies (5046 feet).
A goodly part of the upper section of 441 is a ridge road
that switches back and forth from views to the west and views to the east
just as the Blue Ridge Parkway does (from north to south).

It snowed in the park last week, between one foot and two,
judging from what’s left on the ground.

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It’s only 40 minutes driving time from my house to Cherokee,
we discovered yesterday
(about the same from Asheville).
And about that much again to get up to Newfound Gap,
after lunch in Cherokee.

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We knew this, and it’s always been true,

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but one forgets, with the business of the days
how near this wonder is to us.

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The vistas stun, 50 miles across half a dozen rippling ridges.

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As you get higher you reach the deciduous tree line;

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after a transitional zone of both coniferous and deciduous,
it turns all coniferous.

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Some of the parking areas had room for more cars,
some were packed out into the highway,
especially at the popular trail-heads.
Many hundred hikers climbed to the chimneys.

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After a couple hours of wallowing
in the weird wondrous streetscape of Gatlinburg,
and all the people passing,

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back up to the gap, as night’s shade begins
pulling shadow blankets over the slumbering mountains

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and the traffic descends single file back to Cherokee,
going south, or going north to Gatlinburg.

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I grabbed a keystoned capture of the patinated plaque whereon

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the people of North Carolina, South Carolina, the United States
and the memory of John D. Rockefeller’s wife, Laura, share credit for the park.

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The ice and packed snow softened in the sun, and the 55­° temperature.

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but firmed up as dusky dark settled.

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Where the big trees (still) are,
a trip for another day.

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Yardly working.

Jan 31

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What a difference a week makes.

We got about 14″ at the house a week ago
which revealed some usually invisible travel information.

Did this guy start from a hole in the ground
and make a run for the branch?
Or climb up from the branch to find the hole?IMG_20160124_115150876_TOP

Or this one come out from the porch,
or duck underneath?IMG_20160124_115213161

A hunter, naturalist, or gender-nonspecific scout
could tell if these were from the coming and going
of a narrow-footed mincing sasquatch,
or the launch marks of a rabbit leaping.IMG_20160124_115224884

Most intriguing are the ones that just stop
as if lifted by some racoon rapture.IMG_20160124_115445373

But by this week the snow has gone to ground and gone to air,
melted and sublimated down to traces,
and spring is getting busy.IMG_20160131_140238395

Freed from a foot of snow
clusters of lichen and fungus bloom on a broken birch stick.IMG_20160131_142031567

Rich loam-brown gills under
the dazzle-white caps.IMG_20160131_142016116

The English ivy is unperturbed, by the snow,
or by the mulch of birch, apple, maple, oak and hornbeam leaves
or by the broken sticks of inhabited birch.IMG_20160131_141953766

Spring is coming, or another, or several snows.

Life along the ground abides,
covered or not covered.

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20­°F — you still get hungry.

Jan 24

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Winter is officially here when Garrison Keillor offers his annual celebration.

The weather, he says, is making a serious effort to kill you,
and that’s clarifying, it strips away non-essentials.

Your job is to stay alive.
You’re not a waitress or a plumber or a professor.
You’re a mammal.

There’s no distinction by class or talent,
there’s not even gender, if you’re dressed properly.

I found a warm blooded neighbor, well-dressed, a couple days ago,
emptying the birdfeeder on the back porch.
He didn’t mind the porch light, didn’t mind the bedroom overhead light,
not even the swivelling bedside lamp.

But my flashlight, and my presence,
just two 1/8″ sheets of glass and 1/4″ of inert gas between us,
that gave me enough light for a picture
and made him feel unwelcome.

He descended, backwards,
like a white bronco in a slow chase.

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I told him he could stay,
if he’d just take off the mask.

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Sometimes a house, sometimes a bird feeding station.

Jan 24

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The snow raises the stakes, if you’re a bird.
Most of what you’d eat is fourteen inches under a blanket
of the soft fluffy white stuff.

Birds of the north side.

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Southsiders.

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Southwest.

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Northwest.

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Eastward mobile.

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 From a little distance the feeders look like aircraft carrier in battle.
At any approach near enough to shoot a picture
the birds scatter, nine out of ten,
leaving just the bravest, or the hungriest,
of the finches, nuthatches, mourning doves, siskins,
juncos, blue jays, cardinals, sparrows, robins and the rest.

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New Year’s special.

Jan 7

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Exercise your natural curiosity,
and feed for free.

¡EBOOKS FREE!

from the Ellen and Geoffrey Fletcher Mystery series

For five days in January 2016, the 7th to the 11th, Thursday through Monday

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Free from Amazon.com (the cover pictures below are links), available only in Kindle format. If you haven’t got a Kindle Device, Amazon will send a drone to your home (when they know that you are sleeping) and upgrade your microwave, or install a Kindle-reader ap on your computer or your tablet or on any reasonably intelligent mobile telephone (totally free). You will be everafter able to access many hundred thousands of ebooks, not just mine.

Every three months Kindle Direct Publishing invites all authors who sell books on their platform to trade income for exposure and offer their books for free. It’s a worldwide deal on all the Amazon stores (US, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, India, Australia, Japan, Mexico, Brazil). People who wouldn’t pay for a book from an author they’ve never heard of will take a chance on free stuff. So as the returns roll in, you get to see whether this will be the time there’s finally a bite from the Netherlands or Italy, or whether that firestorm in Japan (well, four books) will reignite. You take what fun you can find in the marketing process, and hope you pick up some new readers.

Let me know what you think: favorable comments warm the heart, unfavorable ones teach the necessary lessons. Comment here, or email mystery@budcrawford.com.

 

FitToCurve

The Asheville Story.

Heart Attack

The Williamsburg Story.

Here are a few comments from old readers.

review snippets (good ones only)

    Fit to Curve is a skillfully written mystery with complex characters and such a fascinating plot that I’m way behind on my chores.

    This series is a favorite with interesting plots and wonderfully drawn characters. Wish the author would write more of them. The type of book you don’t want to end.

    A bed and breakfast mystery. Super characters, well developed. You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. A mouth-watering, good read. Love the old lady with the sharp wit. I’d like the recipes, too.

    The plot builds very slowly. But once I got into it, I was hooked. I liked the characters, and you get a lot of insight into them.

    This is too fine a novel to be mired in the mystery/suspense ghetto. It’s a good mystery, with a complex plot, all the mystery trappings, but the characters are rounded and attractive. The theme seems to me to be a consideration of morality – not just sexual morality (or immorality), though there’s some of that too, for those who like to read such descriptions, but all kinds of morality: for how high a price might you sell your soul?

    Heart Attack is a great read!

    This couple are a great addition to the mystery genre. Sharp and interesting with a bit of humor and spice.

    Snappy dialog. Geoff and Ellen are a great team. He has a definite intuitive method of assessing info and arriving at conclusions that baffle and irk his cohorts. Ellen is more conventional and together are a great team. Unusual mystery not easily solved.

COMING SOON:

Ghost Walk sample                                                                                                             Little Fishes sample

GhostWalk

The Charleston Story: seeking agent

Little Fishes

The Atlanta Story, editor ready

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New year walkabout.

Jan 3

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Doesn’t matter what I think,
some bear’s been shredding them.

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Peck and peck. Repeat.
How much wood? You cannot imagine.

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Several layers interlaced living on decay.

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More and more, the moss beats back the grass.
The extent of it is new and puzzling.


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Evergreen mountain laurel leaves are the thermometer of the woods.
At 43°F they look like this; warmer they lift and flatten;
colder they curl, tighter and tighter, into little tubes at zero.

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And here is 25°F, this morning.

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Walkabout in wonderland this afternoon.

Happy New Year!

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Seeing long and short.

Jan 3

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I told the pretty little hornbeam, forty years ago,
that little maple sapling will not bother you,
I’ll keep it lifted and away.
There’s room for both, I said.

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The spruce looming at the bottom of the orchard was a seedling then,
its siblings all harvested for Christmas trees,
except one pine also grown too big for Christmas.
They’ve grown up entwined a quarter century since.

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Good year for cones on the high branches.

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The trees are transparent now
to the sky and the ridge across the valley
for half the year a solid mass of green.

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See through down to the branch.

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See right through the unending woods, almost.

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In every quarter see the horizon of ridgetop and sky.

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The leaves will be beautiful when they return.
But we’ll miss the long view through the silver trunks
just as much as we miss their dense green cloak.

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And lay the maple low.

Jan 3

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The downhill trunk from a clump of maples
just let go during a storm a couple of weeks ago.

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The fallen trunk stretched almost 70 feet
shattering a lot of the crown.

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But the main body, including the lowest segment
looking like a rotten tooth
had to be chain-sawed into 4-5 foot sections.

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Excellent firewood,
after a spell of curing.

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It was a pretty good long healthy life,
but for the rotten tooth.

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Can’t blame bugs for this one,
this tree was woodpecker-certified bug-free,

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A tree on the ground
passes to other uses
as brush habitat, compost, lumber, stovewood.

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Little bear, bandit in the dark.

Jan 3

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The porch light did not bother him,
nor my flashlight, not the camera flash.

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He was on a mission to feed,
having already eaten, it seemed, his entire family
and become fat as a bear cub.

The technique is, to spare himself acrobatics: tilt and spill.

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Tilt a little, spill a little more,

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then dine at ease along the rail.

I slammed the back door, four feet from him,
and he dove over the rail, to hide under the house,
for almost three minutes.

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Centrality of the Nutcracker tree.

Jan 3

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Final stage dressing for our Nutcracker tree.
It’s been assembled, lighted, be-ribboned, and be-candy-caned.
The present boxes, filled with many-year-old air,
are set carefully — we try for artfully — around the base.

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If you magnify you can just see
the head of the Nutcracker
peeking up from behind the gingerbread house,
waiting for his reveal and Clara’s delight.

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It’s easier to spot him from the side.

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Ultimately, the curtain rises
and the tree becomes the backdrop for the dances.

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The outrageously inebriated maid
has just begun her wobbly dance.
Scandalized, we are.

Three weeks ago, on the stage of the Diana Wortham Theatre.

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Ready to roll: 2015 Nutcracker.

Dec 7

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Here’s our Nutcracker kit, waiting to load onto the truck, thence to be unloaded at the theater.

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Just assemble, and dance.
Which the Asheville Ballet will do this weekend at the Diana Wortham Theatre.

Check with the DWT for tickets and details.

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The changes of the season.

Oct 26

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In the woods
IMG_20151018_150153374the light of fall penetrates
IMG_20151018_150202909as the leaf canopy opens
IMG_20151018_150212623to the sun.
IMG_20151018_150233116In the old orchard, the sharing of the pears,
gravity being generous to the deer.
IMG_20151018_152104755Inside on the kitchen table
IMG_20151018_180301853_HDRthe last roses clipped before the first frost.

Turn, hang on, and finally fall.

Oct 26

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They’ve all turned,
IMG_20151025_155359115_HDR half down, half still hanging on.
IMG_20151025_155348063_HDR We’ve peaked,
IMG_20151024_141410362and it’s been gorgeous,
IMG_20151025_155342490intense and varied.
IMG_20151025_155324311_HDRWhatever unknown mix it takes of sun and rain and chill,
IMG_20151024_141449608_TOPthis year has come round right.

Walnut row.

Oct 26

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It continues to be a splendid season for leaves.
IMG_20151025_155316554_HDRExcept, the walnuts have mostly dropped theirs.
IMG_20151024_141417301But all along the row,
IMG_20151024_141531246half still attached to the branches and
IMG_20151024_141523256half on the ground.

The green husks fire off the mower blades
like little mortar shells.

Blow up.

Oct 26

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While appreciating the sweep of fall below the hay field
and up the south-facing ridge,

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there’s a funny blob on the grass, way over on the right.

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Oh, yes, it is: the ever elusive ground hog,
seeking presumably additional ground to hog.

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Perched in plain sight
if your eyes are sharper than mine.

Just imagine.

Oct 18

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All my writerly instincts go to presentation: show, don’t tell. You shouldn’t explain, just give your story what it needs, enough oxygen for your characters. Good writing serves this end. If a reader is pulled out of your story by clever language, that’s a mistake not a score.

My firm belief. Except, every once in a while, when something is both exceptionally brilliant and moves the story. I’m reading a Greg Iles book, just now, a Penn Cage mystery, dirty dealings in Natchez, one of several. And here’s the sentence:

The past was fighting its way to the surface like a sunken corpse filling with the gasses of decay.

It’s taut and graceful and strong. Right on the edge of just too pretty. But, damn, it’s in a paragraph about dredging a swamp to pull up the bones of long-ago murder victims.

And that makes it okay? Yeah, it does. Probably it’s okay anyway.

Free Fall.

Oct 16

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IMG_20151001_155005008_HDR

There’s always room for a new reader.

¡BRIEFLY FREE EBOOKS!

from the Ellen and Geoffrey Fletcher Mystery series

For five days in October 2015, the 16th to the 20th, Friday through Tuesday.

Try one book (or both) for FREE.

      Free on Amazon.com (the covers below are links), available only in Kindle format. If you haven’t got a Kindle Device, Amazon will send a drone to your home (when they know that you are sleeping) and upgrade your microwave, or install a Kindle-reader ap on your computer or tablet or any reasonably intelligent mobile telephone (totally free). You will be everafter able to access many hundred thousand ebooks, not just mine.

Every three months Kindle Direct Publishing invites all authors who sell books on their platform to trade income for exposure and offer books free, or at a reduced price. It’s a worldwide deal on all the Amazon stores (US, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, India, Australia, Japan, Mexico, Brazil). People who wouldn’t pay for a book from an author they’d never heard of will go for free stuff. So as the returns roll in, you get to see whether this will be the time there’s finally a bite from the Netherlands or Italy (the only ones I’ve never gotten), or whether that firestorm in Japan (well, four books) will reignite. You take what fun you can find in the marketing process, and hope you pick up some new readers.

FitToCurve

The Asheville Story.

Heart Attack

The Williamsburg Story.

review snippets (good ones only)

    Fit to Curve is a skillfully written mystery with complex characters and such a fascinating plot that I’m way behind on my chores.

    This series is a favorite with interesting plots and wonderfully drawn characters. Wish the author would write more of them. The type of book you don’t want to end.

    A bed and breakfast mystery. Super characters, well developed. You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. A mouth-watering, good read. Love the old lady with the sharp wit. I’d like the recipes, too.

    The plot builds very slowly. But once I got into it, I was hooked. I liked the characters, and you get a lot of insight into them.

    This is too fine a novel to be mired in the mystery/suspense ghetto. It’s a good mystery, with a complex plot, all the mystery trappings, but the characters are rounded and attractive. The theme seems to me to be a consideration of morality – not just sexual morality (or immorality), though there’s some of that too, for those who like to read such descriptions, but all kinds of morality: for how high a price might you sell your soul?

    Heart Attack is a great read!

    This couple are a great addition to the mystery genre. Sharp and interesting with a bit of humor and spice.

    Snappy dialog. Geoff and Ellen are a great team. He has a definite intuitive method of assessing info and arriving at conclusions that baffle and irk his cohorts. Ellen is more conventional and together are a great team. Unusual mystery not easily solved.

COMING SOON:

Ghost Walk sample                                                                                                             Little Fishes sample

GhostWalk

The Charleston Story: seeking agent

Little Fishes

The Atlanta Story, editor ready

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Persistant summer greens.

Sep 5

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Looks like a lawn, an expanse of close-cut green,

IMG_20150816_172632215
if you don’t look down to the details.
Oh, there is a little grass blended in.

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Lemon balm, fresh as morning, all year long.

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The fern fronds are evergreen,

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ordered and skilled in their geometry

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beyond anything we have ever done in ours.

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Summer color wrap up.

Sep 5

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The color’s right, but
I’m not persuaded these can be crabby apples,
half the size of grapes.

IMG_20150816_172454669
White with yellow pollen curls, one shy bee.

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White and golden pollen.

IMG_20150816_172137266_HDR

Pale butter yellow, minutes from finishing.

IMG_20150816_172028607_HDR
Halloween orange and pollen gold.

IMG_20150816_172313160

Gaudy glistening glad.

IMG_20150816_172247676

Softly spikey, opening for business.

IMG_20150822_190107401
Spiral down and out, dusted from the day’s work.

IMG_20150816_172342834_TOP
A table treat, just beyond my screen,
table treasure cut.

IMG_20150816_173147784_TOP

Meanwhile, in the grass, sign of summer’s end,

IMG_20150822_185938576
previews colors to come.

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Rabbit range.

Sep 5

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Stalking the wild creature.

30 yards

IMG_20150816_171819147

20 yards

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10 yards

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5 yards

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3 yards

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2 yards

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1 yard

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Hey! You’re crowding me.

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Red-reds sometimes break the camera.

Aug 9

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There has to be a setting

IMG_20150524_201927774

somewhere among all those menus

IMG_20150510_192246917

that each drop new menus down

IMG_20150524_202755678

in hyper-dimensional interaction

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an option

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that can tame

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the red out.

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Snakes in the grass, alas.

Aug 9

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We call them our yardvarks,
IMG_20150801_152354557_HDRthe creatures who emerge
IMG_20150802_203605920from the woods
IMG_20150802_203558629to share
IMG_20150802_200613549pears
IMG_20150802_200452158and the cracked corn
IMG_20150802_200444349we put out for wild birdsIMG_20150718_235737836_TOP

if the bandits haven’t cleared it all.

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Pretty is.

Aug 9

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Pretty sometimes just is,
enough, with no buts, ands, or ifs.

IMG_20150628_131029706

Bees! Pollin’s up! Limited time offer.

IMG_20150628_131039950

Even the silly flowers

IMG_20150706_121632183
and the wild willies.

IMG_20150706_121534456
Here we go again

IMG_20150802_200033015
with the pollination invitation.

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It doesn’t get any better

IMG_20150706_121451106
where the bee sucks — oh, yes — right there.

IMG_20150802_200411219

Don’t be greedy, don’t crash and burn from overweighted knees,
a hundred yards from the bee tree.

IMG_20150802_195921924_TOP
The curve turns,
the dead heads tossed in the brush
free the stems to bloom again.

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