Word-Wednesday for May 19, 2021

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, May 19, 2021, the 20th Wednesday of the year, the ninth Wednesday of spring, and the 139th day of the year, with 260 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for May 19, 2021
Wannaska is humming!

The Ruby-throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) is one of the world's smaller hummingbirds, weighing in about the same as a U.S.A. penny (the average male weighs less, but they're still pretty tough). These summer visitors breed from such distant places as southern Canada to southern Texas, where vagrants venture as far west as California — occupying the largest breeding range of any North American hummingbird.

In the winter they winter fly back to an area ranging from central Mexico to western Panama in Central America. If you visit Florida, you might see them any time of year. During spring and fall migrations, our friends have to complete a 500-mile non-stop flight across the Gulf of Mexico. It helps that these flying darts can slice through the air at 385 body-lengths per second — faster than a falcon, faster than the Space Shuttle!

How? Hummers got heart. In The Hummingbird’s Gift: Wonder, Beauty, and Renewal on Wings, Sy Montgomery notes:

Hummingbirds are specially equipped to perform these feats. In most birds, 15 to 25 percent of the body is given over to flying muscles. In a hummingbird’s body, flight muscles account for 35 percent. An enormous heart constitutes up to 2.5 percent of its body weight — the largest per body weight of all vertebrates. At rest, the hummingbird pumps blood at a rate fifteen times as fast as that of a resting ostrich…

Being a hummingbird does have its disadvantages…

https://www.thefarside.com/

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for May 19, 2021
Sunrise: 5:37am; Sunset: 9:04pm; 2 minutes, 25 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 12:19pm; Moonset: 2:52am, waxing gibbous, 42% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for May 19, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             65                     88                     85
Low              42                     22                     61


May 19 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Devil’s Food Cake Day
• Emergency Medical Services for Children Day
• National Juice Slush Day
• National May Ray Day

May 19 Word Riddle
How do you fix a broken tuba?*


May 19 Pun
A chicken crossing the road: poultry in motion.


May 19 Etymology Word of the Week
window: /ˈwindō/ n., into Middle English from the Old Norse, vindauga, based on the Old Norse words vindr (wind) and auga (eye).


May 19 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1897 Oscar Wilde is released from Reading Gaol.
• 1910 Passage of Earth through tail of Halley's Comet causes near-panic.
• 1958 Premiere of Harold Pinter's play Birthday Party.
• 1999 Andrew Motion is appointed British Poet Laureate for 10 years, the first to request a definite term.

May 19 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1909 Schlomo Joffe, composer.
• 1918 Florence Chadwick, first person to swim English Channel both ways.
• 1925 Malcolm X [Little].
• 1930 Lorraine Hansberry, Raisin in the Sun author.
• 1941 Nora Ephron.
• 1945 Peter Townshend.
• 1946 André the Giant, Fezzik the giant in The Princess Bride.
• 1948 Grace Jones.

May 19, 2021 Song of Myself
Verse 29 of 52
Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath’d hooded sharp-tooth’d touch!
Did it make you ache so, leaving me?

Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan,
Rich showering rain, and recompense richer afterward.

Sprouts take and accumulate, stand by the curb prolific and vital,
Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden.


Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem) from the following words: 

• aretaloger: one who boasts about one’s own accomplishments; one who brags overmuch.
• bête noire: /ˌbet ˈnwär,ˌ bāt ˈnwär/ n., a person or thing that one particularly dislikes.
• cadence: /ˈkā-dᵊn(t)s/ n., a rhythmic sequence or flow of sounds in language.
• harbergery: /hahr-BER-juh-ree/ n., a place of entertainment such as an inn, tavern or public house.
• kachina: /kəˈCHēnə/ n., a spirit being in the religious beliefs of the Pueblo peoples.
• minuend: /MIN-yoo-end/ n., a number from which another is subtracted; in mathematics, a quantity or number from which another (the subtrahend) is to be subtracted. [a twofer]
  
• operculism: /ōˈ’pərkyəlizm/ n., the appreciation of manhole and drain covers.
• querulous: /ˈkwer(y)ələs/ adj., complaining in a petulant or whining manner.
• shillelagh: /SHəˈlālē/ n., a thick stick of blackthorn or oak used in Ireland, typically as a weapon.
• whelve: /WEHL-vh/ v., to conceal, hide or bury something beneath something else; to turn over and hide something underneath; to bury something.

May 19, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
Hummingbirds in Words

The hummingbird symbolizes some commonalities across many cultures, where stories depict the hummingbird as a messenger because of its many stops, and stopper of time because of its speed, and as a symbol of love, joy, and beauty because of its dancing flight.

Hummingbirds animate every indigenous spiritual mythology on this continent, where the hummingbird is an essential pollinator for both plants and poets. Hummingbird myths feature the tiny bird as a healer or a spirit sent to help people. Other legends represent the hummingbird as the fire bringer. Northwest coastal Native American tribes have hummingbird clans. Cherokee legend tells about the hummingbird retrieving the tobacco plant from the evil goose Dagul’ku. As this story goes, an older woman was dying without tobacco, and the hummingbird saved her life by bringing back the plant. Hopi tribes have a hummingbird kachina, called Tocha kachina, who asked the god of Fertility to restore the land. Mojave folklore tells about people living underground in darkness until the hummingbird found a path to the upper world.

Ever the naturalist, Walt Whitman made this diary entry on August 20, 1892:

Butterflies and butterflies, (taking the place of the bumble-bees of three months since, who have quite disappear’d,) continue to flit to and fro, all sorts, white, yellow, brown purple—now and then some gorgeous fellow flashing lazily by on wings like artists’ palettes dabb’d with every color. Over the breast of the pond I notice many white ones, crossing, pursuing their idle capricious flight. Near where I sit grows a tall-stemm’d weed topt with a profusion of rich scarlet blossoms, on which the snowy insects alight and dally, sometimes four or five of them at a time. By-and-by a humming-bird visits the same, and I watch him coming and going, daintily balancing and shimmering about.

Poets love hummingbirds, too. Here are three.

The Humming-Bird
Emily Dickinson

A route of evanescence
With a revolving wheel;
A resonance of emerald,
A rush of cochineal;
And every blossom on the bush
Adjusts its tumbled head, —
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy morning's ride.


Summer Story
Mary Oliver

When the hummingbird
sinks its face
into the trumpet vine,
into the funnels

of the blossoms
and the tongue
leaps out
and throbs,

I am scorched
to realize once again
how many small, available things
are in this world

that aren’t
pieces of gold
or power-------
that nobody owns

or could but even
for a hillside of money-----
that just float
in the world,

or drift over the fields,
or into the gardens,
and into the tents of the vines,
and now here I am

spending my time,
as the saying goes,
watching until the watching turns into feeling,
so that I feel I am myself

a small bird with a terrible hunger,
with a thin beak probing and dipping
and a heart that races so fast

it is only a heart beat ahead of breaking------
and I am the hunger and the assuagement,
and also I am the leaves and the blossoms,
and, like them, I am full of delight, and shaking.


Ode to Hummingbird
Pablo Neruda

The hummingbird
in flight
is a water-spark,
an incandescent drip
of American
fire,
the jungle’s
flaming resume,
a heavenly,
precise
rainbow:
the hummingbird is
an arc,
a golden
thread,
a green
bonfire!

Oh
tiny
living
lightning,
when
you hover
in the air,
you are
a body of pollen,
a feather
or hot coal,
I ask you:
What is your substance?
Perhaps during the blind age
of the Deluge,
within fertility’s
mud,
when the rose
crystallized
in an anthracite fist,
and metals matriculated
each one in
a secret gallery
perhaps then
from a wounded reptile
some fragment rolled,
a golden atom,
the last cosmic scale,
a drop of terrestrial fire
took flight,
suspending your splendor,
your iridescent,
swift sapphire.

You doze
on a nut,
fit into a diminutive blossom;
you are an arrow,
a pattern,
a coat-of-arms,
honey’s vibrato, pollen’s ray;
you are so stouthearted–
the falcon
with his black plumage
does not daunt you:
you pirouette,
a light within the light,
air within the air.
Wrapped in your wings,
you penetrate the sheath
of a quivering flower,
not fearing
that her nuptial honey
may take off your head!

From scarlet to dusty gold,
to yellow flames,
to the rare
ashen emerald,
to the orange and black velvet
of our girdle gilded by sunflowers,
to the sketch
like
amber thorns,
your Epiphany,
little supreme being,
you are a miracle,
shimmering
from torrid California
to Patagonia’s whistling,
bitter wind.
You are a sun-seed,
plumed
fire,
a miniature
flag
in flight,
a petal of silenced nations,
a syllable
of buried blood,
a feather
of an ancient heart,
submerged

From A Year with Rilke, May 19 Entry
Nothing to Frighten Us, from Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904, Letters to a Young Poet

We are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set around us; there is nothing that should frighten or torment us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through millennia of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly, that we, when we hold still, through a happy mimicry, can hardly be distinguished from everything that surrounds us.

Be better than yesterday,
learn a new word today,
try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow,
and write when you have the time.

*With a tuba glue.