Time for a quickie

I'm nearly done with Day 3 of the Minnesota trip, but it's time for a quickie update.

First, the robin situation. The last time we checked in with our little feathered friends, on June 24, they were getting to be big babies ...


Since then, they have kept on growing. Here's what they looked like on June 27 ...


They kept on amusing us by popping up into sight and peeping. It's a small nest, you know. Only so much elbow room ...


Skip ahead to today, July 1. At 1 p.m., just before our lunch, the little ones clearly had become big ones ...


Dad came over for a little talk about life outside the nest. I didn't see any worms ...


So we sat down for our own lunch. Twenty minutes later, I looked--and only saw one little robin ...


This one flapped his wings once in a while and kept preening them, but he stayed in the nest. At 6 p.m. today, I got out the mirror and chair ...


And there he is. I just looked again, and he's still holding the fort by himself.

But tomorrow morning may be a completely different story. This may be the final portrait for this little robin.

***
On to other things. After our vacation the week before, my wife and I were back working at my mom's house last week. We were there on Wednesday and part of Saturday. But the progress was very slow on Saturday. We had gotten to the "spare" room, where she had her desk and writing materials.

That's where we found her creative writing things. Plenty of essays, poems, even an old letter to the editor she wrote (about picking up litter) from before she was married. A book based on her relatives' memories of life in Denmark. A poem she wrote to me (as a baby) and to my oldest son (as a baby) and the anguished poems she wrote after my younger brother's suicide.

It was really hard to look at and harder still to speed through. We also found boxes of old pictures. All that was put aside for another day--they rode home in the back seat on Saturday. Later on, they will be brought out again and studied. But not for a while.

We'll be back there on Tuesday and maybe on Friday this week.

This was also when I had planned to attend that annual neopagan gathering in southern Wisconsin. It's taking place right as I speak. But with the house situation the way it is, it was time off I couldn't afford to take. Not this year. I'm sad about it, but it was my own decision, and I had resigned myself to it some time ago.

That, you may remember, was where I met S two years ago. Ironically, I got a question-raising e-mail from her last week; we've been writing each other all along. Quite brief; she said that lots of things were happening down her way but nothing she wants to put in an e-mail quite now. That's fine, I replied. When the time is right ...

The time is right to send this away and then work on the pictures for Day 3. The writing is nearly done, so once the pictures are done and uploaded, I'll be posting it.