Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
March is still lion-ing, no sign of that lamb at all, though we have entered Aries... Most of the snow melted in a day of cold rain which filled the rivers to just shy of flood stage. The next day it froze and covered the ground in white, which melted by the end of the… Continue reading The Daily: 24 March 2025
I made a bittersweet discovery last week. I had been noticing little piles of chewed up green stuff on the walkways and on my porches. It looked like unripe fruit, so I thought the rodents had gotten into some deep patch of the jungle that had a stunted peach or plum or something. I am… Continue reading The Daily: 16 September 2024
It has cooled down substantially. There have been morning fogs and evening breezes. It's still very humid and the smoke is still hazing the hills, making mountains insubstantial, mere ideas of solidity squatting across the river valley. It is also raining most days, but lightly, not torrents (except for the storm cell that dropped more… Continue reading The Daily: 20 August 2024
The Hay Moon went dark at 7:13am yesterday, over 36 hours before moonset today. So the 10th new moon of my year, the Blueberry Moon, should be visible as a thin crescent following the sun down to the western horizon this evening. This month is the second of the harvest moons and the first that… Continue reading The Daily: 5 August 2024
The Romans had concerns about drought at this time of year. Three very old festivals were grouped together at the end of July to honor deities who presided over watery things. The first was the Lucaria, the clearing of the groves. This was an ancient observance even in Varro's time (116-27 BCE), and little is… Continue reading The Daily: 25 July 2024
Today is St John's Day and Midsummer's Day. Traditionally, this is the best day to harvest herbs. Most of the very large mint family — sage, thyme, lavender, balm, catnip, motherwort, and rosemary, among others, in addition to all the plants named "mint" — are in flower now. Some are approaching the end of their… Continue reading The Daily: 24 June 24
Summer may have decided to arrive. We've flirted with heat here and there, even hit 93°F back in May, but it has not lasted. It would be warm for a day or two, then it would return to jacket weather. As of this writing I still have not planted out the nightshades because it's been… Continue reading The Daily: 17 June 2024
The earliest sunrises, 5:05am, begin on this Thursday in my part of the world and continue until June 17th, with the sun rising one minute later at 5:06am on the 18th. If you don't count seconds, then the longest day length of 15 hours and 30 minutes begins on the Sunday the 16th, Father's Day… Continue reading The Daily: 10 June 2024
Because the universe seems to love irony, on a post in which I talk about the advancing state of breakdown in our culture, the fact that nothing works, the emailed message was somehow linked to an older post and NONE of the social media messaging went out. So here it is... again... hopefully... Apologies... The… Continue reading The Daily: 6 June 2024
Holy shit! It's June! How did that happen?!? I missed much of the last eight weeks. It began with a long bout of COVID. Then there was a new job with pretty much an entirely new learning curve to master. There was fitful garden activity, mostly of a cleaning up of disasters variety. And I… Continue reading The Daily: 3 June 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 