Got Legs Under Me At Last

While the cat’s away…but it wasn’t mice in the garden while we were out of town. It was beetles, weeds, and from the outside, deer browsing on the beans along the fence. Oh well. All that hard work to make pretty gone to seed.

Point is, there is an incredible amount of catching up to do. The good news is: I am prepared and able to do it. Three days ago, not at all.

I’ve never been so disabled by pain as I was Thursday night. After 4-5 dozen back muscle spasms (following a 14 hour drive home from MO) I was beginning to envision a future for myself very different from the one I’d imagined as more or less certain. I could not blink without having my cage rattled by waves of spasm.

Come Friday morning, oral steroids and another pain pill or two turned the corner. And today, I’m feeling pert. Heading out in a few minutes to gather more beans to top out the canner–our first 7  quarts coming out later today.

So while I have accumulated mounds of stuff that is blog-worthy (I’m less and less a good judge of that, it seems) I will let this blog-about-nothing do for now. Here I post an image of yet another botanical unknown–from a pond margin in southwestern Missouri.

Based on the flower-form (inflorescence) of a “scorpoid” or “helicoid cyme” I’m guessing it is in the Borage Family. Anybody have an ID, please offer it up.

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fred
fred

Fred First holds masters degrees in Vertebrate Zoology and physical therapy, and has been a biology teacher and physical therapist by profession. He moved to southwest Virginia in 1975 and to Floyd County in 1997. He maintains a daily photo-blog, broadcasts essays on the Roanoke NPR station, and contributes regular columns for the Floyd Press and Roanoke's Star Sentinel. His two non-fiction books, Slow Road Home and his recent What We Hold in Our Hands, celebrate the riches that we possess in our families and communities, our natural bounty, social capital and Appalachian cultures old and new. He has served on the Jacksonville Center Board of Directors and is newly active in the Sustain Floyd organization. He lives in northeastern Floyd County on the headwaters of the Roanoke River.

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  1. It is hard to tell from just a picture but, Fred, is this yellow dock? It looks a good bit like the dock we have growing near the creek here on the Bayou. If it is, it is good stuff to have around! Great herb for skin ailments!

  2. Nope not a dock. Different family for sure. I’ve not seen this one before, assume it is an endemic that re-emerged when Richard dug the spring out again a few years back. It apparently was not one he planted and recognized.