Once, long ago, on Sunday afternoon I had time to work in my garden under blue skies, in golden light, with a breeze for company. In my garden I made a home for two lilies of the tiger sort and one named Atlanta Moonlight. There were rooms enough in my garden for globe amaranth and the irresistable-to-butterflies pentas; for elegant yarrow and three artemesias which took up lodgings among my canna lilies. I looked for a good place for the brown eyed susans and when I found it, I pushed my shovel into the mulch, turned it aside, discovered a cache of small, white eggs, maybe as many as fifteen of them.

The eggs were small, no more than a half inch each. I reached for one and expected its shell to be hard the way a bird's egg would be. Instead I was surprised to find it felt soft and cool and tender. I worked quickly to move the scattered eggs back together and covered them once more with mulch, though not as well, no doubt, as their momma had. Having discovered the hidden nest, I looked for a new home for the brown eyed susans, one that wouldn't disrupt the nursery---of what, I wondered? Snake? I'd seen one the day before. It knotted up when I pulled a clump of weeds away, looked disgruntled before untying itself and slithering away. So I looked for a new home for the susans, pressed the the blade of the shovel in, turned the mulch and found a second clutch of eggs, this one comprised of only five or six. I was marveling at this second find when a skink emerged from the mulch and scurried away. They were skink eggs.

I did eventually find a suitable home for the susans, not far from the skink nest.

I turned to look at my garden beginning to take shape just in time to notice the moon, large but not full against a late-afternoon blue sky. The Atlanta moonlight lily was facing it, as if it had beamed the moon into the sky or maybe it was that the lily was gathering moonlight for the approaching night.

A few days ago I started thinking about silkworms and their strict diet of nothing but mulberry leaves, white mulberry, I believe. I thought of the silk threads that are formed by the creatures, the cocoon that becomes the source of silky cloth and I wondered if mulberry leaves have something of that shimmer before they are transformed by the silkworms. I know the whereabouts of a mulberry tree that had recently been littering the walkway with an abundance of fruit. I don't think it's the type of mulberry that becomes silk in the mouths of the silkworm but I was curious and on my way home, took a leaf from a low branch. The green surface did have that sheen that catches the light as well as ridges and rows and undulations different from other leaves.

And then, just a short while ago that could have been some long past evening of a journey, I saw the moon again, in a gauze-y cocoon and sandwiched between layers of clouds, top and bottom. I arrived home from my travels just in time for the barred owl to fly darkly, mysteriously, and land on the wires of the phone lines at the edge of my yard. I wasn't even certain I'd seen it, thought maybe it was only some impression of movement conjured by my own mind. I scrambled up the driveway to watch it from the darkness and through the darkness, could see it silhouetted against a background of gray sky, surrounded by the shaggy outlines of tree shapes that twinkled with the light of fireflies as the mist rose and the fog settled.