Feeling for my shoes

"In the fall it was better than at other times of the year. That was because of harvest season, cotton picking, corn pulling and so on like that. There was more money around then. In the spring of the year there wasn't much of anything because people were trying to get themselves straightened out over the winter season. Along about June and July things begin to pick up to where you could get hold of some money. September, October, November and sometimes up through December and sometimes January, that's when you really had to get it. Didn't make no difference what kind of hustle you had to do, you had to get it right through then. Those were the big months, that's when the money was floating around. When things would start to fall off, I would go back to Memphis and kind of take it easy until the next season came"

Blues player and Robert Johnson's on/off travel companion, Johnny Shines, quoted in Elijah Wald's  Escaping The Delta. I love the idea of seasonal music in this sense, of artistic trade syncing in to economic tides in a kind of mutually rewarding cycle - hard, calloused hands in the fields rewarded with coins that fall into the palms of hungry guitar players, the music blooming out just as the crops are cut down. 

Shimmer and rot

Snowy ornithology craft afternoon

Little birds find it hard to forage for nibbles when it's snowing (which it is). They also need food and water every 24 hours to stay alive when temperatures drop (which they have), so if you're lucky enough to own a patch of garden, it's always kind to leave something out for the little feathered cuties. We bought a bucket load of seed/fat balls, but they came naked, without the little fluorescent netting needed to attach them to branches/hooks. Turns out old fishnet tights and a little twine do just as well. Win!