These needles are not difficult to find in any haystack.

Around this Island, you can easily find pine needles under, over and around you almost anywhere. They cover the ground in our woods, litter our trails and roadsides, and are plentiful everywhere the mighty pine tree is found.

The abundance of pine needles has me intrigued. I have often thought there must be something interesting to be done with these abundant green bundles.

And there is!

Rose knows.

Island seaweed artist, centenarian, naturalist and amateur mycologist Rose Treat periodically sends letters to the editor of our hometown newspapers. And she does us a great public service by doing so. Every year or two, she writes a note to remind us to take care around wild mushrooms, and to watch our children, pets and self around these fortuitous fungi, lest we inadvertently ingest the wrong ones and injure ourselves.

Designer Bill Blass’ advice to the fashion conscious was: “When in doubt, wear red.”

Meadowhawk dragonflies know this. Perhaps they even started the scarlet trend, having been around since the Carboniferous Period 270 million years ago. Their ancestors, though, would never make it in today’s modeling world, with their 29 inch wingspan; they were hardly a size 2.

Humphrey Bogart had more than a few memorable lines.

Though “Here’s looking at you, kid” is likely the most remembered and repeated, Bogart uttered another more obscure line that almost everyone, except a helminthologist, would agree with. In The African Queen, he griped, “If there is anything in the world I hate, it‘s leeches — filthy little devils!”

Helminthologists are those who study worms, and they would likely disagree.