Scented air.

It is once again that time of year, when the night air is perfumed by the scent of the little mahogany flowers.  Heady!

As you can see the flowers are very small.  But there is a carpet of them outside.

Peaceful easy feeling

Yesterday evening, the two of us(hubby & I) decided to go to Kumarakom to one of the clubs.  We reached just after dusk.   As it is the time of the 7 weeks Lent before Easter, which is observed by a large number of people in our town, (no alcohol and no meat or fish), there was nobody at the club and we had it to ourselves.
When we reached there was a cool, brisk breeze blowing, enough to make the water hitting the walls near the water go plop, plop loudly.  The lights across the backwater were just slowly becoming visible.  A lone country boat went silently across, with just a little red light flashing-out to catch our famous fish--karimeen, pearl spot--I'm sure.   We sat at a table near the water.  The waiter there asked if we needed a light at our table and we declined the offer.
The sky and the water got dark.  The moon came out.  There was an owl in the tree over our heads; a large fruit bat flew out from the other tree.  There were fireworks visible from the temples across the water.
The feeling of peace still lingers

Mango blooms

This year many of the mango trees around here were in bloom.  There is a venerable giant in the grounds of the playschool I work at, and a beautiful spreading mango tree too.  Then the mango trees in the grounds around my house too were in bloom, more than in the last couple of years.

For the last 15 years or so, many of the mango trees in our grounds were covered by a parasitic mistletoe kind of plant.  When branches of the tree, which had got squeezed by the parasite, were cut off, the tree died out after a bit.  Even repeated peeling off of the mistletoe did not seem to help.  The presence of the parasite kept the trees from flowering This year, I do not see the mistletoe on the trees, hence the mango blooms.  Since it has been so long since the mango trees bloomed, I had forgotten the scent.

The scent of the mango flowers is intoxicating;, sweet, slightly spicy, with the sourness of the raw mango.  At first, when I caught the heady scent, I wasn't sure which tree had bloomed.  Then when the hint of sourness came along too, as the flowers matured, I realised it was the scent of mango flowers.  Now, most of them are no longer visible.  Hopefully, there will be mangoes though, later on.

On a walk

                                                                        Elsa

My Elsa and I were out for a walk on a lovely tropical evening.  The sky was the colour of ripe peaches--all reds, oranges & gold and as we walked the light was fading.  Past some bushes, I suddenly heard a loud, quick rustling.  I hastily moved to the middle of the path--after all there are snakes around and dusk is their time to hunt!  But Elsa seemed quite unperturbed.   Then I saw a shape running up a nearby coconut palm--a glossy, black furry shape.  In the fading light, I couldn't quite see the head.  I thought it might be an Asian palm civet.  But on reading up on it, they are rarely pure black, usually having some kind of marking.  Anyhow, I'll go with the idea that it was a palm civet, since I haven't hear of forest squirrels coming around here yet, and the tail seemed too broad to be a cat's tail.  I stood and watched as it ran to the top of the coconut palm and then jumped on to the nearby tree and disappeared.

      Here is a picture of a palm civet taken a long while back

Lovely sight.

Today I saw a lovely sight.  At the pre-school I work at, there is, at present, a male papaya (pawpaw) tree just outside a window, which is full of flowers.

(taken from the Net)
I saw, from the corner of my eye, two birds fly across.  When I crept up to the window, I saw a beautiful 'Loten's' sunbird sipping the nectar from the flower.  It was a male bird.  He was a beautiful shining dark blue.  Before I could tell the children and get my phone to phtotgraph him, he flew away.  But I have a picture of the sunbird (credit Dr. Krishna Mohan)...

Beautiful breakfast.

I just had breakfast, listening to a bird choir, right outside my window.  There were, when I counted, a tree pie, two racket-tailed drongos, 4 common mynas and a host of jungle babblers, talking and quarrelling, with a little squirrel (chipmunk) who had the cheek to come to where they were rooting around in the ground.  Also, as part of the choir, though not visible, were the' kutroo, kutroo' calls of brown-headed barbets.  Whatever I ate tasted like ambrosia, with such beautiful background music.
Truly a beautiful breakfast.

US summer

When we got to Chicagoland, it was hot and it had not rained for quite a while.  I realised how hard the mud there can get when it is dry.  I love the wood chips they put around the base of trees and around beds to help keep weeds away and keep the ground damp and I thought, if it was here, any wood chips that had been scattered around would have been dust by evening--eaten up by the aggressive termites we have here.

My son had planted some of his usual veggies, but he couldn't do as much work on it as he liked because of a bad back.  But anyway, we got to eat a few of his veggies--a large big purple eggplant, some yellow cherry tomatoes, an orange pepper, cucumber and green chillies.  He has a blackberry bush and so my grandkids and I picked blackberries too.

I got to see a skunk in the neighbourhood--at dusk, my usual walk time--hares/rabbits a-plenty, with tiny babies too and I even got to see a possum.  I saw my first chipmunk, which is exactly what our regular squirrels here are like.  The North American squirrel type we have only in our forests.

I spied a cardinal, who came two days in a row, to sit on some wires going over the back garden.  I saw what I was pretty sure was a bird of prey, but I could not identify it. In the lake, in the park near the house, there was a huge group of ducks and I also got to see a heron and of course plenty of gulls, swooping low to catch fish.

All in all it was beautiful.  But with no SLR camera, and only my iphone 4, I did not get any good pictures.  I saw recently that one can get an SLR lens to fit over a phone lens at a much cheaper price.  May be I should try to get one of those.