Oh, lots of things. [UPDATED]

Congratulations to the whole Distributive Education class - you each get an A+!

This is a book that I actually picked up in a thrift shop way back in the 1970's. It's a high school textbook, published in 1968.



And it's full of very important questions to ponder. You can click each for a bigger view.



I love the service station -- that Invicta is very much like my first car with those same slanted headlights and BIG fins, but wasn't a convertible.


And I think that the woman in the first picture will get home with a dreadful headache.

Painful or delightful realities

Still in Allergy Mode, still with a swollen head, still housebound enough to grind my life to halt. Still in a lousy mood.

So we're watching The History Channel yesterday and a promo comes on for their Face of Jesus (or something like that) show. It's a search through the art images through the ages, and some kind of attempt to determine what He really looked like. Easter weekend is full of Bible history shows and some of them are interesting and informative, blah-diddy-blah, but this one....

Maybe I react because Jesus's appearance is a perfectly fine matter of curiosity, but some people think it's terribly important. Maybe I react because they're going on about that ridiculous Shroud of Tooraloo, I mean, it's from, like, the year 1300, so why are we still on about that thing? Whenever they drag out the Shroud, I turn off.

I am, as my regular readers have heard ad nauseum, a professed Christian and I really have no problem with curiosity about what Jesus's face actually looked like, but, I don't know, blame my mood.

I groused, "I wish we could find out what Jesus looked like, and that he'd turn out to look like Wally Cox."

Really, I'm so sick of Noble, Craggy, Melancholy, Weight Of The World depictions -- and of Noble Shakespearean Actor voices speaking His words too. I mean, what if He looked like Mr. Peepers? Would people be horrified by a countenance with less theatrical pizazz? Would Christianity take a Chicxulub meteor hit?

But Larry had a better idea.

He said, "No, Jimmy Durante."


Perfect.

Think about it. What would people do? What would *I* do? An endearing, approachable, funny face?

I love the idea. I hope people in general would love it too. Love a Jesus who looked like Jimmy Durante. Take his teachings seriously.

Happy Easter, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.

Temperamental Tuesday

I've decided this should be Temperamental Tuesday.

I've had nuisance allergies before. I've never had incapacitating allergies and not breathing for days on end puts me in a foul mood. This week I'd like to be The Queen of Everything and ban the following:


1. "Flirty." If ONE more lameass publication trills about how "fabulous" it is for a woman to be, look, dress, live "flirty," and how she should long to achieve flirtiness, I will have to find someone to kill for it. This demeaning goal for women must be destroyed immediately.

2. Use of the word "dated" on HGTV. "Oh gawd, that is so-o-o dated." Anything that is not steel gray or mushroom beige is "dated." I guess a neat, clean, simple-design working oven that has a dial with numerals in an outdated font won't roast chicken.

3. Spies -- In my novel, I show rather cynical young women making fun of the fictitious college's Seven Ideals. I based these on the Ten Ideals, which were a real tradition at my college that we in the 70's considered a relic of the past. In that, we probably were a little too cynical, and at first, when I heard that the college has now revived it, I thought that might be kind of nice. But come to find out they've revived it as a secret society that evaluates people without their knowledge, including stalking them online to make sure they're Worthy. I am real real glad I'm not a student there right now because I find this appalling.

I know, it's only to give awards, not to criticize or penalize. I don't care. When I read : "Members agree the secrecy is fun and makes sense because it keeps students and employees accountable for their actions by not knowing who might be watching them," I shuddered.

4. Dear Quality Paperback Book Club - Finding me after a decade and sending a perky "We want you back" letter was rather impressive, but writing to my former married name was a big big mistake. If you have this address at all, you know that name isn't listed here and therefore isn't my name anymore. QPBRUstupid?


5. Styrofoam bras. 80% of every lingerie department consists of stiff preformed-foam brassieres that could drive home from the mall by themselves. Really. Go shopping and look. The racks look like a model for a domed colony on the moon.

6. Cell Phone assumptions -- You..have..one..new..message: "Hey, I'm the delivery guy for Chairs-r-Us. Call me back before 4 if you want your chair today. Bye." WHAT is your frikkin number? ...Oh, a thousand pardons, what am I thinking? Those of us who cling to the prehistoric land line and don't have each caller's number displayed shouldn't expect the world to accommodate our idiocy. Let me make several calls trying to chase down your number. I beg your forgiveness. Not.


7. Reptile prints. On clothes. On accessories. On anything. Make them go away.

--
I'll be normal again soon. Honest.

Relocation

So! We're out on the upstairs porch, where we have not hung out in months. It's a good vantage point for me, so that Larry can show me the yard work he did, which in part trimmed back a lot of limbs and vegetation to get more sun onto my new raised bed.

A ladybug has gotten in and is crawling up the porch screen.

Last summer we bought 4000 ladybugs, and if i can find a picture I'll add it - they seemed to vanish before I could blog about it, but they didn't really. Bit by bit over the summer and fall, it became clear that a lot were around, and as it warms, they or their progeny are reappearing.

This must be one of them, post-hibernation. She'll never find her way back out of the porch. I brush her into my hand and toss her outside.

Wait. There's another one...

And another and another and....

&#*%^$!

A female must have come in last fall, wintered in the molding someplace and hatched out a big, big family. And they're doomed if they stay there. A few might find their way through the cracks, but not many.

Those specks are ladybugs -- if you click it for a larger view, they're more visible.

We really had not planned to do a ladybug relocation, but Larry dutifully got the ladder and I went for the not-Tupperware. He brushed bugs into the plastic container and I shook them outside, while he repositioned the ladder.


Cool - got five this time!

Larry urges one to let the movers relocate her.

Hey, thanks for the delivery service!

(He didn't eat any, at least not while we were out there -- when he popped out from under the eaves, I started shaking the ladybugs out on the other side of the stairs.)

Clever little bugs - they kept hiding in the molding from these Big Predators who were out to capture them, and we maybe caught half of them. The rest -- a few more will find their way out through the crack around the door. Or maybe we'll do another sweep. We got maybe a couple of dozen this time around.

Gardening with allergies

Still haven't caught the gastro-intestinal virus (Thank You, thank You, thank You!!) but my close-up work in the dirt to finish the new raised bed garden did give me an allergy attack of epic proportions. I browsed online for safety masks, but my eyeglasses won't stay on when I wear those stiff ones. I looked at surgical masks, but all the options I saw tie around the head and neck and I hate ties or rubber bands pulling my hair and slipping down. I knew I'd never put 'em on.

Meanwhile Larry had a dental appointment and came home with the best solution ever. These masks that dentists and hygienists wear loop over my ears, and are wonderfully comfortable. The dentist was nice enough to give Larry a half-full box for me! Highly recommended for work that you love but that brings you in contact with allergens.

So - I got my seeds started, in JiffyPots [TM]. Next was how to keep the wildlife from digging in them.



We'd bought a cheap window at Home Depot, to use for a cold frame. Oddly, it's an exact fit for the raised bed, so Larry also came up with this idea for protecting the pots. We used one of the toppers and another broken one to block the uncovered end of the window and thwart our little woodland friends.

Beat the clock

Old box garden in foreground -- and a new one in the background.

We had our first warm day 3 days ago -- a month late (!) -- but I ran out and started this year's garden project, feeling like, in this climate, I really should have started the seeds in indoor pots at least a week ago. Didn't get to it. Maybe tomorrow.

I've been playing Beat the Clock. Not only to have the cool-weather-loving vegetables planted before it's too late, but to get the new box garden built before tomorrow's predicted rain washed the soil out of the wheelbarrow.


This is the new project yall get to watch me do wrong this year! Won't that be fun? What's "wrong" about it is that I've put it right next to the woods, which is practically like setting out a buffet for the wildlife. But for the right amount of sun and shade, it's the only place. It will also get a tall wire fence around it that won't be pretty but might help.

I had to grade the site to make it sit level. Then I needed to weed all the little grass and wildflower roots out of the dirt and shovel it back in.


There. Now it can rain all it wants to.

I used the top layer of concrete blocks from the old box garden -- instead of the one deep box I had last year, they now make two low boxes. The old box garden will stay put, but at a one-block height. It gets used later in the season for heat-loving stuff, so it's secondary priority.

The third reason I'm trying to beat the clock is that everyone here has had a Very Unpleasant stomach flu. In fact, make that two "Very's." I'm fine so far, but, as the Eternal Pessimist, I just know I will get it too. Actually, in this case, I'm more of a realist. So I'm preparing for it (with provisions, laundry, and due warnings to all who might need my services), and wanted this box built before the flu flattens me!

The infantilization of women continues

I never write about abortion, which could be kind of a cowardly thing to do -- I hate getting yelled at -- but in the case of that particular issue, it's more a matter of not having a solution. I don't think there is one, and if i'm going to infuriate people, I might as well save it for something I have a solution for. And I find abortion heartbreaking.

But once in awhile a stand is called for, and in this case it's gotten dragged into the health care debate.

Only, i outrage both sides. I support a woman's right to choose. Abortion is a tragic and nasty thing, but often precipitated by a tragic and nasty circumstance. It's a decision based on her situation and informed by her individual religious beliefs, and the correctness of those beliefs is something I don't think the legal system has any ability at all to determine with even a shred of justice.

But Planned Parenthood keeps sending me emails about how terrible the Stupak Amendment is, and these emails infuriate me just as much.

From an article that seems to be a clear explanation:

[The Stupak amendment] says no health insurance plan receiving federal subsidies can pay for abortion, except under the three exceptions already allowed by federal law. Women who want insurance coverage for abortion would have to buy a separate policy.

The Senate bill took a different approach. It says health insurance plans operating in a new consumer marketplace can cover abortion, but it may only be paid for with private premiums. Money from federal subsidies would have to be strictly segregated from any funds used to pay for abortion. Consumers would have to write two checks to their insurance plan, one for the regular premium, the other for abortion coverage.

Admittedly, I can't see what in the world made National Right to Life call voting for the Senate version "a career-defining pro-abortion vote." The difference I see is only about how the same restrictions would be administered. Maybe people who speak legalese see something I can't. But the Stupak thing -- my liberal friends will ream me for this -- looks acceptable to me.

ONE, it allows plans that get federal subsidies to cover abortion in cases of rape, incest, threat to the woman's life. Those are the "three exceptions" mentioned. I think it should include a woman's health, not just her life, but the Hyde amendment is what set those parameters, and i doubt if any greater degree of coverage could be implemented unless Hyde were changed. Protection for women who've been violated is in place.

TWO, if she wants coverage for elective abortion, she can buy it privately. (I realize "elective" abortion isn't a good use of the term, but I can't find a word that doesn't seem to label non-life-threatening cases as trivial.)

And why the bleep shouldn't women have to ... here's a wild idea .... make the decision to choose the coverage?

"Choose." "Decide." Recognize 'em? Those pro-choice terms we've been hollering for decades?

It burns me to remember supporting the concept of Empowered Woman, entitled to her own choices -- brought to me by the feminist movement. Only to find that same movement now demoting her to an ignorant being of limited thinking ability whose decisions just won't do and must be managed by The Wise Shepherds. The same feminists who loathe the Biblical excuses for limiting woman's legal powers -- "In pain shall she bear children, yet her desire shall be for her husband and he shall boss her around" [1] -- are now advocating a view of women as eternal victims run by their own reproductive urges.

We can't, they claim, have a system that requires women to plan ahead because nobody plans to find herself unwantedly pregnant.

I disagree. Yes, plenty of people lack basic reproductive smarts. That doesn't seem to me to be adequate reason for treating women as childlike creatures who can't plan or weigh alternatives. Remember, the issue is about women who are shopping the exchange for a health plan. Reading plan charts, talking to sales reps, considering options.

It was choice-opponents who said for years that women just don't make sound decisions.

I do understand that poverty keeps people in a survive-the-day state of mind. And I hate that some women say, "It won't happen to me," or feel too strapped or hopeless to invest a few dollars a month in a plan that will save them a lot more money, trouble, and lost work hours later. None of these arguments are without truth to them.

But it needs to be attacked on a different front, like, duh, education. In my legally-uneducated opinion, however much hardship people bring on themselves by not using power they have, the law must treat the right to choose and the responsibility to choose as inextricably tied. Each is meaningless without the other.

As is often the case with politics, I think advocates of choice are fighting a different battle from the one voiced in their emails about hardship. Planned Parenthood sees all these efforts for what they really are -- an attempt by the Right to Life movement to reduce abortion access.

Neither side likes to put its real agenda into formal statements for public consumption. Choice opponents are doing all kinds of little legal dances to wrap the process of getting a legal abortion in reams of red tape, under the guise of Terribly Supportive Concern like "presenting facts for making an informed decision," and "time to reflect."

I despise all efforts to treat women like idiots. But, legally, there's a line, and red tape doesn't cross it. It isn't good and it certainly doesn't treat women like competent adults, or treat people of faith like people who should have freedom of faith. The difficulties that poor working women have in performing all the hoop-jumping are real and need to be addressed.

All i'm saying is that, legally, Stupak's clause doesn't seem to me to breach the basic right, and doesn't set a legal precedent that could be used to dismantle the right.

Part of posting such a thing is to risk being called a terrible Christian and a worse liberal, but I'd be pretty cowardly to disallow comments. So - any and all respectful disagreements are OK, but invective will be deleted.

--
[1] Genesis 3:16. I mean, you know... paraphrased.

Possibly more than you want to know about how my weekend is going

....so I will not say a lot about it, but make it a brief Public Service Announcement. I bought this thing a year ago and couldn't muster the courage to try it, so it occurs to me that others may have the same misgivings.

I was sure that it would cause a burning sensation like the ones I got as a kid, when swimming pool water went up my nose. I hate that a lot but, much worse, I thought it would resemble the sensation of drowning. No way. Pass.

I had to be miserable enough to give in and try it, and o! I found out I'd been wrong. So wrong. Using a neti pot feels wonderful. It needs repeating at intervals over the day, but it feels so good that I don't mind. Maybe it will shorten this cold/allergy/whatever is attacking me.

Happy weekend.

Gimme that Old Time religion

Got cats? Got box springs?

Whose fur this is, I think I know.

We had two problems. One was that Very Hairy Cat, otherwise known as Downyflake, tore open the underside of the box spring (a misnomer - they rarely, if ever, put springs in them anymore) to crawl up into. After living over the years with several cats who discovered this, I'm pretty sure that it's a favorite cat-thing to do. We tried to block access with a messy and dust-collecting little village of boxes which, obviously, didn't even work.

The other, more superficial problem was that the ugly bare box spring showed. (Last photo, inset.) We gave up the bed skirts, for both access and cat-related reasons, long ago. Neither our light summer blanket nor the heavier winter comforter dangles down far enough to cover it.

I honestly don't know whether I read this idea someplace, or made it up myself. But it occurred to me that:

nice sheets over the box springs would disguise their upholstery, and ...

putting those nice sheets over the undersides of the box springs -- i.e., sheeting them upside down -- would block Downy from his little cave.

So we did, after as much fur removal by hand and vacuum-cleaner as we could manage. This should work on any size bed. I individually sheeted each of the 2 twin beds we have pushed together to make a king-size, and used plain ones of a generic color to blend with the linens and the room, but there are plenty of ways to use the idea with anything, from K-mart's cheapest to designer patterns. Here, there's not much point in trying to make it look all HGTV-y since the stored items under the bed are still exposed. It looks good to me. This is a hard-working living space.

With cats.

The Broccoli Diaries

The snow didn't harm the broccoli plants, but that didn't amaze me. They'd thrived through lots of nights at 5-10 degrees below freezing, 'teens-to-20's f.

What surprised me was that we're still getting below-freezing nights most of the time, and ... sink me, if there aren't florets starting! Now. Buds have appeared in three of the plants. The biggest one is pictured below, sharpened for clarity.

And I now own a book called Vegetable Gardening in Florida. This isn't Florida but advice that general books give for normal places just doesn't work in our coastal-SC summer heat. I don't yet know if it will solve any of my problems but I can already say that, if i'd read it first, these buds wouldn't have surprised me at all.

Once every 20 years

February 13, 2010
7:00 - 7:30 AM

An inexpert panoramic

Snow and shirtsleeves. Kind of.

All right, two long sleeve shirts are a couple increments heavier than "shirtsleeves." But this is a strange snow "storm".

At 6:45 PM, I went outside to lock up the car. A few raindrops had fallen on the walkway.

I was not uncomfortably cold, even as I was dressed, in a double layer of longsleeve shirts, and sweatpants. No coat. I dawdled, petted a grumpy Scooter The Cat, who flopped onto the damp driveway and rolled to Cute me into letting him in. I apologized to him for not bringing out the key to his downstairs foyer.

If I could be that comfortable without a coat, I figured that any snow we got would be late-night, after the temp dropped.

At 7:00 PM Larry looked out and said, "It's snowing."

The car was already coated.

We both ran for our cameras. And I discovered something totally cool. Last year's snow flurries barely showed up in pictures, but night photography makes all the difference -- the flash captures the flakes in midair!

But this is decidedly strange. I was out there, again, coatless, snapping snowfall pix. My hands got cold but i was otherwise not too uncomfortable, even hanging out on the porch for a photography session.

Check out the snow layer that built up on the car in only 15 minutes! If it rains later, it will all wash away, but the radar sure looks like more is coming. This might be interesting.



--

UPDATE -- 10:00 PM :

We want to avoid confusion.

We're terribly afraid that you won't know what this is.

So we're calling it something that it's not.

But we're doing it very clearly.

So you won't be confused.

Thank you.

Does somebody just not get it?

Breaking news : J. D. Salinger has died at age 91.

His somewhat controversial life is not terribly interesting to me. It hasn't spoiled Catcher in the Rye, which remains one of my all-time favorite books. Whatever his character flaws, a jerk can write a very good, touching book.

This is my copy, acquired in hardcover for durability, and with each of the three days over which the story takes place marked on the bottom page edges. (It's something I do when the days, or other calendar increments, over which a story takes place interest me. On my copy of Gone with the Wind, I can flip right to a particular year - 1866? 1871? Quick and easy.)

I was no English major. I've analyzed a little poetry and very few novels and have more of a plays-by-ear than a reads-music approach to interpreting a book, but the author of this article made me grind my teeth when he parroted the requisite "Americans are so shallow" explanation for Catcher in the Rye's popularity:

Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams: to never grow up.

Am I just literature-illiterate, or is this absolute bull?

Holden Caulfield does not idealize childhood one bit, much less want to stay in its powerless state. He hates bull, not adults or adulthood per se.

He certainly thinks children haven't learned phoniness yet, but I see no indication that he thinks staying a child is the solution to anything.

The title of the book -- hello? -- is about his wanting to protect children.

A. That means they need protecting. Not from growing up, but from the things that can happen to them as children. They don't know enough to avoid running off of cliffs.

B. He wants to be their protector. That's not the role of a child.

It isn't just naïveté about dangers like cliffs that makes childhood a hazardous time. There are also things that come and get you whether you're careful or not. Are we, like, forgetting that Holden was a kid himself, when his beloved brother Allie died? And he slept in the garage and smashed all the windows? Holden is under no illusions whatsoever that childhood is this innocent time untouched by life's horrors.

Holden doesn't want to take the growing-up out of life's process. He wants to take the phoniness out of being a grownup.

I know this article's author isn't the only one. I've heard it before, the interpretation of Catcher in the Rye as some kind of hymn to the Peter Pan syndrome. I couldn't tell you where; I never paid much attention, but somehow, today, it seemed too stupid and galled me. I'll cheerfully ream any idiocy in American culture, but loving this book is, to me, one example of readers having good taste, even if there are far too many examples of their having bad taste.

I'm meant for better things.

The rest of you are welcome to stay out there in the wild. Enjoy the next Arctic Blast. Frankly, I can do better.

I've found a lovely warm garage. They didn't even notice me moving in.

They even run a space heater in the little foyer that opens into it, but the bourgeois cat who lives here needs it more than I do. I just hunker down out here in the garage itself, among all these boxes and pieces of furniture, and nobody knows I'm here. Seriously, they have NO idea how long I've been in residence. I tolerate the cat, who's a grouch but who is the reason for the endless supply of fresh water and Vibrant Maturity [tm], so I don't quibble.


That Vibrant Maturity is good stuff, man.

The people who run this place are dolts. There's nothing subtle about them. As usual, they've turned out the lights, and clunked back upstairs, making it abundantly clear that they're out of here for the night, and they even put out an extra bowl of food. So now I can just sashay out and help myse--


Oh $#!t.

Pelicans

I almost never catch good action shots, so this is a rarity. Zooming, as usual, fuzzes out the image somewhat, but it was still cool to catch these guys in flight.

It pays to be well-behaved

There's a new TV show that I am not allowed to watch. OK, not really, but whenever a promo for it comes on, Larry says firmly, "You can't watch that," and I whine appropriately: "You never let me have any fun."

Howe and Howe Tech is about these two guys who build heavy duty vehicles, and Larry is afraid that I might learn too much from it. A working tank, in my hands, would be ... trouble.

But not really for the reason he thinks. Sure, it would be tempting to ... to not have to yield to certain other drivers out there. You know what I mean. The ones in the towering SUV's, careening around you while on the cell phone, who endanger your life. The idiots who cut you off, or take your parking space or who, on a little narrow road, come so close to center to turn left that they block the road so no one can turn in. A tank would be real handy at times, and the temptation would be hard to resist.

This footage ...




has run a bazillion times on Discovery, but the first time I saw it, I was far too enamored of it, and he's never forgotten that.

But I am actually lucid at times and know that avoiding points on my driver license is a good thing. I got my reward yesterday, when the Dreaded Day arrived -- a trip to the DMV to renew my license, an event that not only means I'm older, but means we've lived back here in SC for nearly ten years(!).

I have a clean driving record. I walked in, passed the eye test, and walked out with my license and its requisite mug shot in my hand, within minutes. And it's good for ten years! The Badly Behaved drivers were put through much less pleasant protocols.

So, really, I wouldn't use the tank to crush other vehicles.

No, I would use it to plow a line straight through the landscape from here to Charlotte, NC.

Charlotte is my hometown, and is no longer the pleasant small-ish city I grew up in, so I don't really want to spend a lot of time there. But I do have relatives, relatives I actually like a lot, and friends, and Borders Books, which is nowhere closer, so I'd like to get there maybe just a little more.

But the utter absurdity is that, even though Myrtle Beach is a MAJOR destination for the residents of this now-big city, there's no direct route. The drive is a misery of three-digit bleak highways.

To get there from here -- and these are the major routes anyone takes, I am not even including the local twists and turns that apply to the specific addresses at the start and finish -- you take:

501
to 76
to 52
to 52/401
to 34 (for only about 1 minute)
to 151
which becomes 601
to 74 which goes through several towns,
becoming Independence Boulevard
(traffic, strip mall nightmare) at some point
to ... here's a choice of major arteries (495, 51, 16, others)

The 501, 151/601, and 74 legs are ENDLESS.

The only good part is the halfway point. It's a big, wonderful farmstand/store called McLeod Farms, which has a cafe, picnic tables, and a nice little store full of great produce and delectable baked goods. It makes the drive bearable. Just.

But we drove it 3 times this past year, and I tell ya, if I had a tank, I'd flatten a nice straight route from here to some point on 74 that easily connects to a decent road.

And whatever criminal charges I incurred, they probably wouldn't involve disobeying rules of the road, because there ain't no roads. Not yet anyway. Once I got out of jail, I'd still have my license! OK, maybe not. But I'm not sure it wouldn't be worth it anyway.

The accidental gardener

The LAST thing I ever thought I'd blog about in January was a crop I planted in June.

A couple of our summer crops turned out well, but neither my carrots (all leaf and practically no root) nor my broccoli gave us any eatin'. The broccoli nearly died and even when I put it into its box planter, it never thrived. By the end of the heat season, the leaves had dried up and crumbled away leaving skeletal stems just kind of sitting there in the dirt.

But they were technically alive, and I had nothing better to do with the planter for the winter than leave them in it. Didn't weed, didn't water. Pretty much paid no attention to the plants at all.

In the cooling of autumn, they began to leaf out and perk up again. Hoo-boy. Still, I thought the hard freeze would be their death knell.

I knew broccoli was a cruciferous veggie, making it a cousin to the ornamental cabbages that like cold temperatures and that people put in their gardens for the icy months. But I had no idea just how close the broccoli and cabbage cold tolerance kinship really was!

Here they are - photo taken today. Hale and hearty, after two solid weeks of nights in the 'teens and 'twenties fahrenheit. No flowers, but the leaves seem perfectly happy. Just wow!



(Hmmm... OK, this picture is enormous! I'm still learning the new computer's photo program.)

A computer that works is a wonderful thing!

The smallest, and most eclectic, sampling of a YouTubePalooza!

The Freeze of 2010

The top 2 pictures are pretty self-explanatory. That middle photo is very like one I posted about a year ago. The last one shows thin sheets of ice suspended in the grass at the high tide mark, where the ebbing tide left them.