Best darn day in the bosque EVER!

Today I finally got down to the bosque to photograph the beaver damn in one of the ponds behind Tingley Beach:

I was pretty thrilled to see this lodge here, because I'd only seen the beavers dug into the mud since coming to New Mexico.  This was fun, and because they built it right at the edge of the path, I was able to get up close.

When I was leaving the pond, a huge bird flew overhead.  I stared, and clutched my heart, and stared, totally forgetting I had a camera in my hand.  For the last 5 years I'd wanted to see a wild bald eagle, and today I saw one.  Unfortunately, it was too far away by the time I recovered my shock enough to raise the camera, and I chased out across the flood plain onto the sandbar hoping to get a closer look, but he was gone.  I literally wept.

Then I headed back toward the trail. I use an old abandoned birds nest to let me know where I am in the bosque, since it's close to Tingley Station.  I figured if I backtracked to the nest and walked through the edge of the cottonwoods, I'd be able to see a porcupine.  So I located the nest...

and was shocked to see movement.

Of course, my first look didn't look quite like this photo, with the new resident obligingly sticking her head up over the edge of the massive nest.  So I found myself wondering , WHOOO would be in a nest that big?

For the record, that's a Great Horned Owl.

Of course, I got to see a porcupine:

and some of our regional woodpeckers:

Turtles in the pond:

plus all the geese and ducks...

But the raptors really made my day.

The Weird Sisters

From time to time I write reviews for BlogHer Book Club, and I was happy to be able to do so for Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters. Often I get books that are heavy and sometimes painful to read, but this was a wonderfully fun read without being vacuous.

The tale revolves around three sisters, daughters of a Shakespeare professor who has named them after characters in the Bard's plays. They find themselves back home when their mother begins to succumb to cancer, each evaluating their own lives and the wrong (and right) turns they've made along the way... and in doing so, not only rediscover themselves, but each-other.

The book is laced with references to the Bard. The women's father speaks almost solely in quotes from Shakespeare, and the girls names are taken from some of the best known of Shakespeare's plays. Even their lives seem influenced by the story associated with the names they are given. But beyond Shakespeare is the story of the eldest child, the middle child, and the baby of the family all grown up and trying to shake off the expectations of their names and birth order to find what they truly value in their lives, and to recognize that as different as they are, they are all three together.

It's hard not to like a family which, like our own, finds comfort and guidance in books. Even more, as a fan of the Bard, it's far too easy to see Rosalind, Bianca and Cordlelia in the women, even as the book sheds the names in favor of the nick-names Rose, Bean and Cordy. The book is written in the first person plural, which took me aback somewhat at first, since I found myself uncertain who the narrator was supposed to be, using "we" to describe the sisters together but "she" to indicate every individual sister. I quickly shed my discomfort with the narration I had with that (as a former English teacher, such things do bother me when reading) in the pleasure of the stories, and now, in reflection, I find that it enhances the idea of the sisters as a unit, as three parts of the whole working together/apart in harmony rather than discord.

Rose the care-taker, Bean the big-city shark, Cordy the free spirit all find hope and stability in the very things they could have never imagined, whether coming home or leaving home, and most of all, in accepting their differences and finding perspective in their lives. In some ways, those archetypes of modern womanhood are present in all of us, and it's hard not to relate to one or all of the sisters as they are forced to accept their pasts and change their futures. A constant undertone, lending a subtle note to the story, is the unnamed mother's struggle with cancer. She acts as an anchor to the three, otherwise seemingly adrift after the disasters in their lives lead them back home, and an excuse for the three to be back in their home town when they find the lives they've chosen are. perhaps, not the lives they really want.

BlogHer Book Club reviewers will be discussing the book online for the next four weeks, and you can join in on the discussion or learn more about The Weird Sisters on the BlogHer review page for The Weird Sisters, and read a little more about in a post by the BlogHer Book Club Host, as well as take part in the discussion of the book with our first question: Which of the Weird Sisters are you most like?