(I began this post yesterday and I'm finishing it this morning. I have regained feeling in my hand, you'll be happy to know.)
Okay, so starting today (yesterday!), I'm going to post in one or both of my blogs every day until Christmas. True, it doesn't make any sense. I'm really busy and I just get crankier all the time and right now I can't even feel my right hand because I was applying Ben-Gay to the husb's poor aching back (Guitar Hero really does a number on those of us with largely sedentary lifestyles).
But I love this season so I'll give it a try.
And what's more, I'll use that song to add a challenging theme to my posts.
On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me... (one numb hand)
...a partridge in a pear tree.Okay, a little Googling has revealed that everyone wants to claim the song's meaning for their own purposes. The prevailing theory is that the partridge is Jesus and the pear tree is the cross. But there are bird watchers who claim the first line is actually "a partridge in a [bastardization of the French word for partridge]". So now we have songs about bird pregnancy to warm our hearts this holiday season.
Well, speaking of bird pregnancy, let's reflect on one of the most precious and heart-rending experiences of my 2007: the house finches on the balcony.
In March, we hung up some hanging plants and soon realized that a pair of house finches had chosen one as their home (we realized this when the husb tried to move the plant and a bird flew out at his face, ha ha ha). They laid some eggs. The eggs hatched to babies.
All the while, things were getting kind of dire because we couldn't water the plant and it was starting to get leafbare (new word alert!). That was also during the time of massive windstorms sweeping through Southern California, and as we are on a hillside, we watched the hanging plant swing and twirl in the wind with a great deal of fear in our hearts.
Finally, we completely rearranged the balcony furniture so we could hang the plant from the tile-top table, from which we removed several tiles to make this work. Then we sat and watched for the agonizing few minutes when the parents sat on the railing, looking up at the spot where the plant had hung. They searched the entire ceiling of the balcony. It was the cutest and most suspenseful thing I've ever seen. Finally, the mother was like, "Oh, DUH!" and flew right down to the plant in its new lower spot.
In the new location, I was able to wait until Mum and Dad were away and snap some very good photos (one of which was on another Animal Planet show my company produced, although they had to say it was taken by "Winston Schmidt", since they'd already used another photo I took, although apparently Jeff Corwin made fun of the first photo when he had to introduce it... it was a picture of a lizard).
But I digress. (That should actually be the name of this blog.)
Anyway, the ending is sad. Too sad for Christmas. Let's just say that thanks to a nasty scrub jay who'd been terrorizing the backyard (including the hawks who'd nested in the Eucalyptus across the street), I came home one day to find no partridges in my pear tree.
I learned a lesson about hanging plants: don't have them.
In fact, that's our moral today: hanging plants will always break your heart.
Happy holidays!
PS - Delaying this post a day brings us down to 11 days of Christmas, so maybe I'll run over into Boxing Day.
Labels: holiday, nature
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