Once in a while I’ll insert a mini-post having something to do with gardening, just as a break from the longer posts. So here is the first such.

One day while walking through the rows of my garden corn plants, I came upon this little scene. A feather had blown in and landed near the base of a leaf where it diverged from the corn stalk. Somehow, it became stuck to the stem. The light happened to be behind the leaf, which was helpful.

The main theme of this story-image is the veins of the white and gray feather artistically complementing the veins of the green and white corn leaf. The intensely white leaf base pointing to the feather—with the feather pointing back—as well as the distant, colorful objects in the mid- and lower left, add balance to the overall composition, which was utterly perfect. I didn’t need to do a thing with photo-enhancement tools of any kind; nature did it all for me. All I had to do was snap a pic with my cell phone. A couple days later, the feather had blown away, its job done.

From here on, the story is about gratitude. Thanks to the unidentified bird for producing the feather and then releasing it, to the wind for wafting it to this particular corn stalk, to the gleaming leaf base and veins, to the stalk that produced it, and to whatever caused the feather to stick to the stem, all just in time for me to come strolling by with my cell phone camera. Nature dazzles!