STICKY BUDS

Mr. HCB has gone off to the tip with the car fully loaded - we are picking up our new baby car tomorrow and he says quite categorically that there won’t be any rubbish going in that!  

After he had gone, I decided to go for a walk along the road, and intended to take a photograph of the gateway leading to the brook.  There are lots of trees along this road, so I was clicking away quite happily until I got to the gateway, where I took several more photographs.  

However, on the way back home, I spotted some low branches on a horse chestnut tree - and there were lots of sticky buds.  I must admit I have never really looked at them closely before and they are quite beautiful.  The buds were in various stages, some just in bud and tightly curled, some with the leaves just poking out, others with the leaves fully open and others with the flower bud already formed and showing.

Great, I thought - one of these will make a good blip for today - until I came across this one that looked just like an owl sitting on a branch.  This one is SOOC with no touching up whatsoever.  Amazing what you can see when you REALLY look!

I carried on home and stopped to look up into some other trees to see if I could see the little blue tit that was singing its heart out.  A lady, with a lovely Scottish accent, so obviously not born here, but who said she lived jut down the road, stopped and asked what I was looking at. She told me that she lived near the cycle path round the corner and often heard a woodpecker but had never seen it.  She also said she worked at a local pub, just down the road and often walks to work.  Yesterday she had seen a heron in the car park and I could tell she was really excited about that, but she said she said by the time she got her phone camera out, the heron had gone - but she saw it and that’s the main thing.  I explained about blipping and showed her my photograph of the “owl” and she agreed it did look like one!

A beautiful morning, with the sun shining, plenty of photographs taken and a good conversation too, albeit with a stranger.  What more could I want?

“Each time you say hello to a stranger, 
your heart acknowledges 
over and over again 
that we are all family.” 
Suzy Kassem

In case you are interested, I have decided to start a Blog, and you can view it here.  At the moment it has the same name as my Blip page, Life is a Challenge - bit of a "belt and braces" job!