Saturday night was the Night of the Lunar Eclipse, so naturally I went out to get a photo. (Uh, wuzzat?)
Hell, that’s no eclipse!
Standing on a nearby hilltop long after the sun went down due to tall mountains blocking the eastern horizon, I felt I was in the perfect spot: freezing to death, facing exactly the right direction, with my feet crunching on gravel and ancient potsherds… But the moon came up with nary a blush — dang, I was too far west to see any sign of the eclipse! But just off to my left was a perfectly formed, inverted tumbleweed. Now that was odd, because while the wind had been howling up a storm the day before, we hardly ever see any tumbleweeds in this location. There weren’t any others around, just this one, so I picked it up (ouch!) and carried it home. Might as well return from my photo shoot with something, I figured. The next day I put on tough leather gloves and moved the thing around.
Tumbleweed birdbath
This was getting interesting. I posed it everywhere: on my truck, atop the kitchen greenhouse, by the garbage can, near the woodpile, and in the flowerbeds. Everywhere I went, I left a trail of vicious pointy little seeds that may grow up to be tumbleweeds someday. I love these things, useless though they may be, for their persistence and kinetic joy on windy days in open country. Once a long time ago, driving from Tucson to Austin with my sister, we stopped in southern New Mexico to admire a similar tumbleweed by the side of the road. My adventurous sibling decided to take it with it, so we stuffed it into the back seat of the Saab. What a prickly mess…
Don’t try this at home, but it do look kinda purty by the front door:
Decorating on the cheap (ouch)
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