A Duke\u2019s Mixture blog is one containing a few totally unrelated items, so please bear with me.<\/p>\n
Unrelated item # 1:<\/p>\n
This morning while getting dressed on the bench in the closet, I saw a genuine antique staring back at me through the sides of our plastic sewing kit. In that moment, the thought that occurred to me is this: A GenZ’er and probably most Millennials wouldn\u2019t have the foggiest notion of what that is.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/IMG_1397.jpg?resize=225%2C300&ssl=1\")
And what was that ancient item? My mother\u2019s darning knob. The frame for Evie\u2019s pedal-powered Singer Sewing Machine had four drawers. One was for spools of thread and bobbins, one for scissors, measuring tape, and pin cushions, one for buttons, and one for the darning knob.<\/p>\n
I remember my mother sitting at the kitchen table and using the darning knob to repair my father\u2019s socks. Does anybody repair socks anymore? No, we simply toss them. People who endured the Great Depression didn\u2019t toss anything if it could be fixed.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s when I remembered one other thing about my mother\u2019s sewing equipment. Her darning needle was so much bigger than all the other ones, it stuck out of her pin cushion like a sore thumb.<\/p>\n
Unrelated item # 2:<\/p>\n
A week or so ago I wrote about finding a baby bird stranded on the pool deck. I moved him out of the sun and into a shady spot. I also put down some bird seed and made sure there was readily available water nearby.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/PastedGraphic-1.png?resize=139%2C300&ssl=1\")
For the first day or two he scurried out of my way as I passed while doing my steps. A couple of days later, he could flap his way up into the raised flower beds. A day or so after that he made it as far as the bird feeders in the lower branches of the trees, but I could also see that without fully grown tail feathers he wasn\u2019t very adept at flying.<\/p>\n
We feed birds. We have a couple of seed containers as well as a couple of suet stations. What I started noticing is that, whenever I passed by the bird feeding tree, all the other birds would go zooming off, but Mr. Short-Tail, as I have come to call him, stayed put. He\u2019d watch me go by, but he wouldn’t leave.<\/p>\n
This past Sunday I was sitting on the porch when I realized both of the suet containers were empty. When I went out to fill them, he sat on the other one watching me. As soon as I filled the first one, he jumped over to it and stayed there while I filled the second one from only a foot or two away.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when I dialed up my cell phone\u2019s camera app. The photo you see here was taken from all of six inches away, and Mr. Short-Tail didn\u2019t move a muscle.<\/p>\n
After the photo shoot, I noticed that he stayed right where he was\u2014on top of the suet container. In the past, I had seen bigger birds chasing him away. This time, he puffed up his wings and told them in no uncertain terms, \u201cThis is MY suet.\u201d<\/p>\n
The little guy\u2019s flight pattern is still a bit wonky, but I\u2019m sure it\u2019ll improve as his tail feathers get longer.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, I can tell you that, although I\u2019m no wildlife photographer, this one really made me happy.<\/p>\n
Semi-related item #3:<\/p>\n
After sending out the first post on Mr. Short-Tail, someone sent me a note calling me a \u201ctree hugger.\u201d I\u2019m not sure I qualify since the bird in question isn\u2019t a northern spotted owl. .<\/p>\n
However, later on, as I sat thinking about that comment, these words came to mind:<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not a tree hugger<\/em> Which immediately brought me back to a tongue twister I learned in back in college.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not a fig plucker Try saying that one three times in a hurry. If that doesn\u2019t end up making you giggle, I don\u2019t know what will.<\/p>\n PS. I understand that when photos are included, some folks can\u2019t see them. If that happens, just send me a note at jajance@me.com, and I\u2019ll send them via email.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Duke\u2019s Mixture blog is one containing a few totally unrelated items, so please bear with me. Unrelated item # 1: This morning while getting dressed on the bench in the closet, I saw a genuine antique staring back at me through the sides of our plastic sewing kit. In that moment, the thought that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-pets"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-NT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3093"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3097,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3093\/revisions\/3097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nOr a tree hugger\u2019s son \u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n
\nOr a fig plucker\u2019s son
\nBut I\u2019ll pluck figs
\n‘Till the fig plucker comes.<\/em><\/p>\n