I am seeing red. And shades of hot pink along the shoreline and in shallow pockets along the marsh that edges Felix Neck. Sound the alarm, because this sighting is a true red scare for those in the know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, "Every wall is a door." His friend Henry David Thoreau noted that “Deep are the foundations of sincerity. Even stone walls have their foundation below the frost.” In either case, neither of them could be more right — about stone walls or sincerity.

What a dirty trick! Old Zeus couldn’t get the girl, so he had to create a complicated ruse to possess her. In Roman poet Ovid’s book, Metamorphoses, Zeus’s subterfuge is described:

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, writer Douglas Adams makes this observation, “Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much . . . the wheel, New York, wars and so on . . . while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reason.”

American entomologist William Harris Ashmead had an eye for detail and an infatuation with insects. He must have liked fruit, too.

Living in Florida, he founded a publishing house to print agricultural tomes with a focus on bugs. His passion for pests was palpable, and in 1880 he penned a book called Orange Insects: A Treatise on the Injurious and Beneficial Insects Found on Orange Trees in Florida. This was just the beginning of his love affair with insects.

I seem to go round and round on this. My conundrum, like its source, is never-ending. I love wreaths. Certainly they are very natural, very creative, and very beautiful. However, for me, the wreaths we see decorating homes and businesses have an interest apart from any religious significance that might be attached to them. The tradition of wreaths predates Christianity. Their precursor came in ancient times. A head decoration, called a diadem, was worn to indicate royalty or importance.