Tea for Tuesday

Good day to you all, please join Kimmie, Patty and the rest of the tea group. If you do leave a link on Kimmie’s blog.

With the Autumnal Equinox occurring last week I felt it was time to bring out some rich, warm colors, and a bit of nature. This morning it is Earl Gray, English Breakfast tea, with a little squirt of milk and honey.

This week I have been thinking a bit about nature, especially around the house and while on my walks. We live in the North Park area of San Diego, north and east of Balboa Park and the San Diego Zoo. We live in an urban area that has canyons, trees, and wildlife amongst our urban sprawl. All inhabitants seem to live in harmony, adapting to the surroundings and for the most part staying within our designated zones so to speak.

This month has brought us many monarchs, and their rich carnelian, black and rust colored wings are so elegant gliding through our Lantana. Earlier this month we knocked down the paper wasp’s nest (resting by the lotus pods above), as it was being built right over our back door. The occasional wasp would lazily wander in under the screen door, and usually meet it’s demise under our indoor cat Tommie’s claw.

Earlier this summer I found a baby skink in our living room, luckily I found it before the rest of my furry room-mates. Without too much fuss, I was able to coax it into a cylindrical vase with a piece of cardboard and we both made it out the door to the backyard to freedom and relief.

Normally we have a colony of Orb Weaver spiders building webs through the yard, but we haven’t had but a handful this year. Secretly I am glad of this, because I always detect the web after I have walked right through it and spend the next few minutes insanely searching my body and hair for the eight legged terror.

We also have a flock of parrots in the neighborhood which urban legend tells they originally escaped from the zoo and mated with domestic parrots. I am not sure how it happened but it is quite a sight to see them fly over in the flock. It is quite an all together annoying occurence when they land on the telephone wire outside your bedroom window at four in the morning and chat with one another.

Occasionally we will find larger canyon dwellers in our back yard, the lone swaggering skunk, and to our constant surprise Butch our outdoor/indoor cat has never been sprayed (whew!). A few times I have encountered an opossum and once a very large raccoon eating from the garbage bag I was too lazy to put into the trash bin.

But last week on one of my walks I had a very wonderful, and now that I think about it scary encounter. I was walking along a path that bordered a small grove of Eucalyptus trees on one side and a large apartment building and a few houses on the other. I heard rustling in the undergrowth and out flew a full grown cotton tail. Cool I thought, until I heard further crashing through the underbrush. I stopped so as not to have whatever was coming next run into me, which was smart because out came a full grown coyote.

Oh I thought, then OH, then OH OH. I just stood there, twenty paces away. I was not really afraid and neither was he, we just were sort of surprised to see ourselves in this unusual encounter. I had no way of protecting myself other than my house key and a handful of bottle caps that I had found on the walk. He of course was fully equipped to do whatever needed to be done. He fortunately decided that continuing the hunt for the bunny was far more interesting than the tall thing standing there. OH KAY.

If you would like to read more about nature, I found a wonderful site that is called Morning Earth that you may like to visit. I also read the daily Earth Poem by John Caddy which is always accompanied by a beautiful photograph. Well happy Autumn to you and I hope that all of your encounters are unusually wonderful. Christen