Sometimes our lives are quiet, like reading a local newspaper front to back without looking at the headlines, just reading about what happened to who, day after day.  And sometimes our lives are like headlines and more headlines with no time for details, no time for the articles, no time for who’s who, just go and go and go.

Slowly I’m moving toward a more quiet life, and I’d like to reflect that here on dragonwood.org.  I have succeeded to some extent… the snick! of firewood splitting isn’t so very loud after all.  Our headlines are smaller and more local, terrifically important to us, but hardly momentous. I’d like to think that the headlines of our lives are quieter but more important, messages that set a mood for a period of time, or reflect the mood around us for a season, for a phase we’re in, or just for a spell.

The photo banners at the top of the site are our headlines now, the headlines of our life together, of the seasons of Dragonwood. They tell of our doings or local happenings, or they tell of what surrounds us here, what captivates this moment in Dragonwood time.  Mandy carries her camera out and captures the action, or I pause with my little phone camera and capture a random moment… and a banner appears.

Autumnal Asparagus

Right now it’s late autumn (late because the leaves are mostly down, and mostly not raked up) and the brightest colors are mostly past.  But as we step out our back door toward the garden, on bright crisp afternoons, we are treated to a tiny pyre of bright yellow flames where the asparagus patch has caught fire.  The colors vary with the sun angle, from fiery yellow and gold to damp bedraggled yellow matter custard.  And it’s hard to catch it with the camera, hard for the camera or the eye to find focus and produce an image that shares its feeling.

But in this banner, I managed to catch not just the color of the lacy fronds, but there in the folds a single autumn leaf cradled in the fragile arms of this wondrous vegetable.  Suspended in time, representing this short season of Dragonwood, when quinces smell up the porch (and kitchen), and the last of the cider is being pressed, and the younger chickens and kittens are wondering about the chill in the air, this one browning leaf is kept from blowing away, kept in these thin woven arms, held for me.

Banners of our seasons, seasons of our lives, lives at Dragonwood, lived daily with eyes open wide.