This was also taken on the evening with the yellow flowers.
The title of this blog post comes from the beautiful but heartbreakingly sad song “Casimir Pulaski Day” from Sufjan Steven’s Illinois, which in my opinion is his masterpiece. Having wandered through the goldenrod on Sunday, I can easily see how one might take these to a heavily burdened friend to brighten their day. Curiously, though, while I thought a quick Google search would tell me what a 4-H stone is, there is no obvious artifact to which this might refer other than one guess that perhaps it refers to different types of precious stones that 4-H leaders get for for certain numbers of years served in the organization.
At any rate, if you like Casimir Pulaski Day, you may enjoy more Sufjan. And I should note that much of his work is far more exuberant and energetic. My favorite albums of his in order are: Illinois, Seven Swans, and Michigan. Oh, and as the season is quickly approaching, I cannot forget to mention Songs for Christmas. There will be a moment this Winter when I will be driving in the dark and listen to this and weep and be joyful.
At any rate, that is a very long introduction to these pictures with goldenrod either in the foreground or background, which will hopefully make you joyful.
I think I have tried this at least once before with some success. If you would like to play along the rules are simple. Just construct a 5-7-5 syllable haiku with the phrase “indian summer” as either the 1st or 3rd line and include it in a comment to this post.
Not sure what Indian summer is? In short, it is a period of warm weather after the first frost, but people tend to often use it for any warm day in the autumn after autumn has begun to make its presence known. I think it also just sounds rather nice.
Happy writing and syllable counting.
Here’s my first go:
Under apple trees
The air drowsy, sweet; buzzed bees.
Indian summer.
I had to be quite patient to get these shots and take multiple exposures. Then I had to wait all afternoon and evening and half the night to work with them. Still, they were worth the wait. These have been sharpened and cropped a fair bit to get them to look detailed at this size. Larger images, of course, would be more impressive.
In a related note, the other day I was musing at how odd the Urdu word for “bee” seemed to me. It is “shahed ki muhki,” which literally means “fly of the honey.” I thought it odd to call bees flies. I think that no longer. These images show bees to be remarkably like large flies, albeit with stingers and the ability to industriously gather pollen on their hind legs.
The last shot is not great, but I could not resist posting a face to face shot with a wee, flying bee. Let’s call him Bertie. Enjoy.
P.S. I did feel a little like the “bear with very little brain” as I waited for some of these shots with bees buzzing around my head. If it were not such a lovely day, I might have tried saying “Tut, tut. It looks like rain!”
