Red Robin and Armadillos at the Gimp Compound

It's warm today, and while the morning began with miserable fog that didn't bother me at all because I slept through its evil opaqueness, the rest of the day's weather has been slowly less dreary. There's still patches of snow a few inches deep in sheltered spots around the neighborhood, and, I imagine, gigantimous piles yet in local parking lots that I haven't visited lately.

I've been observing the flowers and birds.

There's been a robin in the backyard deciding how much of this neighborhood will belong to him. Yes, the first robin of spring. Or maybe he's pondering the embarrassing lack of privacy of last year's nest, on the light fixture next to the back garage door, unfortunately placed so we humans could all gather in the bathroom and gawk out the window at their precariously perched abode and its contents anytime we chose. We saw the nest building, some of the domestic negotiations resulting in three perfect blue eggs, the babies within hours of hatching, and the sibling rivalry just minutes before their first flights.

And I'm missing my blind junco bird friend who has not appeared at the sunflower seed feeder at all this past week. He was a loner, a bit unkempt, and his left eye had been tormented terribly by disease or injury. It was bald and featherless all around the little unseeing eye, which he kept toward the kitchen window so the other could see the world as he ate. He seemed perfectly competent in flight, ending up precisely where he aimed to go. So I'm hoping he decided to go elsewhere as the weather has warmed. I hope he'll be back here next year.

A lot of birds have little impairments if you take the time to observe. There's a grackle with a club foot, and another with some hip issues that give him a funny gait. Maybe they were injured in the vicious scraps they get into fighting over food. In any case, from what I can see they seem to manage well enough.

On flowers. Earlier this week I saw the orchid exhibition at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. I find orchids fascinating and particularly enjoy the varieties that have little arms outspread (like in this photo just above) because they're showy, but when the flowers get old the arms sag despondently. It's sort of human and sweet.

And then there are the amaryllises, or as my finely-bred family like to call them, the "armadillos." These are magnificent flowers that you can keep in a dark closet for most of the year, bring out and water in late winter, and watch them send up enormous stalks topped by blooms the size of dinner plates. Exhausted afterwards, they like to sit in the closet again. I had one on my windowsill at the rehab hospital last spring and recall in particular how one nurse's assistant who had just helped me onto the commode insisted on standing there next to me admiring the flower while I thought mean thoughts about her in hopes of driving her away.

We have five or six armadillos. I don't know why so many except that when you keep things in your closet, they sometimes tend to multiply.

(Visual description of three photos: The first is of a Phalaenopsis orchid, a bough of blooms in white petals with pink lines radiating from the center out toward the edges. The second photo is of a bough or orchid blossoms that have the nose and arms like the Lady Slipper orchid but bloom many at once on a branch -- the arms of the flower sag after the bloom ages a bit. The third photo is of two "armadillos" with big sturdy stalks and giant buds about to open.)