It has become a cliché to say that every family with a camera has a closet stacked with shoeboxes full of snapshots of cute kids, pets, and vacation scenery. The huge scrapbook industry is built on the guilt of [mostly] women who want those photos arranged on pages—and those cute little paper corners we always used in the old days aren’t going to cut it anymore. Enter the computer program FotoFusion from the company LumaPix. You can combine, resize, crop, and embellish photos without having to buy all those supplies, and I think every page ends up having a little personality. The website of the company has a tutorial and links to all sorts of ideas, and the least expensive version of the software is all most people should need. For more examples of what you can do with the program, see this gallery.

We hang our feeder full of Niger seed outside the living room window and within hours the American Goldfinches are jostling for position. The hummingbird feeder never fails to attract our only Northeastern U.S. resident, the Ruby-throated Hummingbird. But there is no seasonal miracle quite like the arrival of the distinctive Cedar Waxwings in our single scraggly wild cherry tree. One day I notice a few ripening cherries hanging at eye level (tasty but more pit than flesh) and begin my surveillance, and the next day the driveway is littered with cherrystones and stems as the flock of feathered bandits swoons over their discovery. They hang upside down to get a grip on a cherry, tug on the branch causing the leaves to bob and flutter, hop noisily from branch to branch, and congregate briefly in social groups (though I have never seen them pass cherries from beak to beak as many websites claim they are known to do). Another day and they’ll be off to the next stop on their migration. How do they find us? These cherries do not ripen at the same time as the cultivated ones in local orchards, and I haven’t seen another tree like it in our neighborhood. There probably isn’t enough fruit on our tree each year to make even one cherry pie. You can hardly see the cherries against the bright sky and intensely green leaves when you’re looking directly up at the branches; surely they’d be even more difficult to spot from above. Yet, here they are for that one remarkable day, tolling as reliably as any atomic clock the passage of our years.

Many strikingly beautiful butterflies and moths have earlier incarnations as boring, monochromatic caterpillars. The multi-hued larva pictured here, the Forest Tent Caterpillar, will morph into a heavy-bodied non-descript tan moth, smaller as an adult than it was in the caterpillar stage. Or, at least, that’s what would happen if it were not now hanging out in a Mason jar with some tasty leaves of cherry and maple trees, the kinds of trees it would devour in the U.S. Eastern Woodlands. (Once a second-grade teacher, always a second-grade teacher.) The caterpillar is described in the guidebook as having keyhole markings down the back, but I think the design looks like a parade of wasp-waisted insects. I’m trying to reason out what camouflage or protective role that design is playing; nothing in nature is an accident. Wasps and flies parasitize this caterpillar, and also the egg and pupa stage, laying their own eggs in or on the host and thus acting as a natural control of this population of deforestation engineers. Maybe the illusion of an insect parade on the back of the Forest Tent Caterpillar is intended to convey the message, “I’m taken; find another place to lay your eggs.”

The popular girls usually got that way for perfectly valid reasons, but in every high school there are others who are more lovely or smarter or better musicians. It may be that these underappreciated girls just aren’t good at self-promotion, or maybe they don’t even care about getting invited to the dance. In the garden, the golden marigolds stand proud and hardy, the rosy geraniums can be seen from down the block, the petunias spread in purple waves, and impatiens light up the shade. They earned their popularity, surely, and can be found at every garden center in May. But there are some shy or at least less well-known plants that are so beautiful it is a mystery to me that they aren’t elected prom queens. One of these is verbascum, a perennial that I grow from seed. It blooms the first year--twice, makes a graceful and long-lasting cut flower, and is very hardy in Upstate New York without special treatment. Although the blooms can be pink or yellow, the most subtle version is a pale peach color with a purple center. There are other insufficiently celebrated plants in my garden, for example, Kousa dogwood, cuphea, crocosmia, and amaranth. They deserve their own gallery of photographs to show them at their best, and that’s another project to put on my list.

The oft-repeated statement that smell is the strongest sense, the one most able to brings memories to the surface, may be simply p.r. for the aromatherapy industry. Certainly humans can’t mobilize their olfactory skill as proficiently as insects, which can be trained in minutes to sniff out drugs ( read more here ). But there are certain aromas which take me to a distinct time or place; no matter what recipes inventive cooks come up with to pair, say, pork chops with stuffing, the smell of stuffing equals Thanksgiving turkey, period. The fragrance of any petunia takes me back more than 50 years to 433 E. Railroad Street in Nesquehoning, PA, where pink petunias reigned supreme. And I will forever think of what we call our turn-around garden when I smell the strong, sweet odor of lilies of the valley, their proximity to the hot asphalt driveway intensifying and radiating the smell. These tiny bells are the birth-flower of May and symbolize a return to happiness.

The happy family poses on the front porch of their new house, as though it has been one big love-fest getting there. In fact, there was a quick decision to replace every window in the house in the interest of lead paint abatement, a couple pieces of furniture were too big to get up the winding staircase, Grandpa was assembling furniture in one room while Daddy Swiffered and vacuumed madly in the next, and Mommy vowed to leave no box still unpacked by week’s end. On the other hand, on the big day the sun shone, the movers puffed and strained good-naturedly, Coco watched excitedly, and Felix roamed delightedly from playroom to family room to front porch to back yard. It was a fine effort by all.