Thanks to Doug Kamholz for the beautifully written and very insightful July 22 review of my book Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Living and the Dead in Vietnam. He gets it.
–Wayne Karlin, Lexington Park
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Dear Bay Weekly:
I share Mr. Burton’s frustration, in your recent edition, that a windmill or groups of them on a distant hill should be considered unsightly by the governor [July 22 Letter from the Editor]. We have forgotten how the toy windmill can hold a child’s curiosity and how the wind through one’s hair in a car or on a boat can relate our senses so close to nature and its sublimity.
Quite the contrary, the aesthetic of a functional object responding to nature has far more appeal to me and others than, say, the ugliest utility lines anywhere in the world but along road frontages in the heart of our cities and towns, made even more disgusting by the recent high-tech FIOS lines with clumsy widespread connector boxes hanging in midair.
Whilst on the nature of wind and nature’s response to it, I’d like to thank Mr. Koblos, for I have enjoyed reading The Osprey Saga while also watching how my osprey family continues to grace my dock on the South River in its eighth season.
Osprey are expert indeed in their instinctive response to wind. As the three girls grow (I name them after my three granddaughters, Sophie, Sasha and Sabine), the mother shelters them from the sun and the wind. They adjust to the direction of the wind — obviously so as not to ruffle their feathers — as well as to the direction of the sun’s rays.
But an observation I’d like to share with Mr. Koblos and his readers is that when there was only Sabine left in the nest, the nest was indeed flattened out. Mother did not hang around nudging her along. When the breeze came, Sabine flapped her wings and her body hovered over the nest, up and down a few times, and stopped after the breeze had passed over. In short, Sabine needed the wind to take off vertically so as not to fall into the water.
Thank you for this wonderful community paper.
–Peter Kou, Edgewater
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Dear Bay Weekly:
For a German recipe, I’m looking for a special kind of peach, called Indian Blood or Cherokee or black cling. It’s supposedly bloody red in both flesh and exterior and can grow up to 12 inches in diameter. I believe it’s a late peach, ripe in late August or September. I’ve looked at farmers’ markets and called the Bay Gardener, The University of Maryland Cooperative Extension Service and various peach growers with no success. If your readers can direct me to a source, I’d be very grateful.
–Haidi Zech, Edgewater
Editor’s note: Any ideas? send them to [email protected].
