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Chincoteague Ponies

Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, Accomack County, Virginia, and Worcester County, Maryland, 17 July 2023

Chincoteague Ponies, 17 July 2023

Chincoteague Ponies are feral horses that live in Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge in the Virginia part of Assateague Island.

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A Different Box Turtle

Roane County, West Virginia, USA, 21 October 2023

Eastern Box Turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina)
Roane County, West Virginia, 21 October 2023

This one chose not to stick its head or legs out, so all we saw was the shell. The colors are strikingly different from the ones we’ve seen around Clarksburg (see here). According to the description given by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (see here), this is probably a juvenile since the keel in the center of its carapace is quite pronounced.

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For Those Whose Work Is Invisible

A few years ago I saw pictures of a friend’s boat, newly painted and restored after many months of work. He was justly proud of what he had done — the boat looks wonderful. I know that he’s a thorough person, and that the parts that cannot be seen have been as masterfully attended to as the parts that now, as he says, cause “everyone to smile” when they see it. And as I looked at the pictures a tiny voice in my head said “For those who paint the undersides of boats”.

This is the opening line of the poem “For Those Whose Work Is Invisible” by Mary Gordon, part of a group of texts titled “Prayers for the Unprayed-for“, published originally in The Paris Review in 1999. I first encountered this poem as a song Suzzy and Maggie Roche were singing on my car radio one morning as I was driving to work.

During the largest part of my working career I developed and programmed a computer system that supported the work of a library that circulated books (audio recordings, braille, large-print) to people who were blind or visually handicapped. What I did was essentially invisible to the people who were served by it, even to the library staff who used it, since only I ever saw the code and the logic that ran the system. The words of the song immediately struck home with me, and for some years the text of the poem decorated the wall by my desk as an acknowledgement of all those unseen things that keep the world working, all the unseen efforts of people we don’t notice.