This standing shell of a once great tree.

 

 

 

How many creatures has it housed over the years.

 

This tree

 

 

A honey mesquite.

 

It goes up.  It comes back down and hits the ground.

 

Then it goes up again.

 

I tried to get it from all different angles, but it is so mixed up in, and wound around, the other trees, I just couldn’t capture the scale and complexity of it.

 

 

And bougainvillea in bloom.

 

A simpler subject.

 

I’ve been thinking about Haiti

 

 

Even as a youngster, a preteen, I was aware that Haiti was a place that was not safe to go.  It was depicted that way in movies at the neighborhood theatre we walked to every week.  Maybe I also garnered that impression from the stack of every issue of National Geographic magazine ever, that lined the bookshelves at our house in Long Beach.  And now, how is it today?  Gangs and violence running rampant.  Not a safe place to go for even a moment.  How did that happen?  How can a nation stay lawless and unsafe for its entire history?

 

I looked it up.  Once the wealthiest and most prosperous colony in the Caribbean, Haiti gained its independence from France in an extraordinary revolution in 1804.  The native inhabitants and slaves revolted against the overlords and drove them out.  Haiti became the first independent nation in Latin America and the first black republic in the world.  But there was a catch.  An agreement was reached in 1825 that for Haiti to maintain its independence, it had to reimburse France 150 million Francs for the value of lost property.  That “lost property” included the value of the slaves France lost. (The slaves that just revolted to gain their freedom from France.)  In return, France promised to stop blockading their harbor and bombarding them.  The citizens of Haiti were allowed to be free, but only if they bought themselves back from France.  In all the years since their independence, Haiti has had trouble putting together any infrastructure because any extra money always went to France.  It couldn’t pay the entire debt right away, so it took out giant loans to be able to make enough payments to keep the warships at bay.  So far Haiti has paid nearly 30 billion in today’s money and still owes 21 billion.

 

There is surely a lot more to the story of why Haiti is so lawless now:  political struggles, corrupt leaders, foreign interventions, and natural disasters, but they sure have had the odds stacked against them for the first two hundred years.

 

The face of politics

 

 

Local elections.  It seems there is always an election going on here in the Valley.  And election time means many billboards and yard signs.  We were noticing recently how one candidate had so many more yard signs than anyone else.  Did that mean that that person had more money, or had more money behind him?  Probably the latter.  That person won the election, which left us to wonder: “Did we just elect that person on the billboard, or did we elect the person with money, whose name we will never know, behind that person?”

 

 

Can you spot the Greater Roadrunner in this bush?

 

 

 

 

We noticed him hanging around the yard.

 

 

A little spooky.  Not a lot, but sometimes he did have to sneak.

 

He hopped up into the firebush for a while.

 

 

 

 

And for our Wild Kingdom moment, he blasted out and snatched a sparrow!  I didn’t get a photo of him with a sparrow in his mouth.  He left the yard as soon as he got it.  Then a few minutes later, he came back for another.  No harm to the house sparrow population here, we’ve got plenty, but now I guess we know the serving size of sparrows.  Two.

 

 

A walk a day

 

 

This time, Frontera Audubon Society Nature Preserve.  A little 15 acre preserve in the heart of Weslaco; a Tamaulipan thornscrub forest.

 

 

It’s a neat walk, and includes a native sabal palm forest.

 

 

Incompatibility

 

 

Two incompatible functions taking place at the kitchen sink and counter.  Cooking and cleaning.  I guess it’s okay if food gets in the way of the cleaning, but I cringe at the thought of a splash of dish soap compromising our food prep!