spiders

Several years ago, one of my doctors recommended twenty minutes of sunlight per day as part of a treatment plan for depression. (Sunscreen first, of course.) Since then, it seems that more and more medical professionals want to talk about the health benefits of natural light. And I’m eager to listen.

I don’t know if anyone has studied or quantified the healing properties of sunlight, but personal experience convinces me to keep dragging myself outside. Even when the weather is bad. Especially when the weather is bad. It’s easy to feel content standing in a sun-soaked yard. Less easy when the yard is rain soaked, or iced over, or clotted with smog.

In winter, when I sometimes miss my twenty minutes, I lapse into dark moods and sleepy hazes. During the summer, when I average quite a bit more than twenty minutes, I suffer far fewer episodes of depression and/or anxiety.

At first, I tried reading during my sunlight minutes, which led to a few unfortunate sunburns due to forgetting the time (or going to sleep, depending on the book). Then I tried walking, which quickly deteriorated into fitful laps around the yard. I talked on the phone, weeded flower beds, trimmed roses, and doodled in notebooks as poem fragments refused to become poems. I played with the dog and painted the deck. Nothing took. Nothing worked well enough to become a routine, not until my new camera arrived.

Weeks rolled into months as I experimented with the zoom and macro functions. My twenty minutes of sunlight became twenty minutes of photography, which became this blog. Despite appearances, this isn’t a photography blog or writing blog or poetry blog. It’s a depression and anxiety blog. A sunlight and yard blog, measured in twenty minute increments.

Yesterday’s twenty minutes found a honey bee, a moth, and a spider web (look away, if you’re arachnophobic…)

After the spiderweb, my twenty minutes stretched into an hour, due to this butterfly. (I believe it is an Eastern Tailed Blue.) It flitted through the sparse patches of clover in our back yard, ignoring my eccentric hands-and-knees pursuit. Today I have a mild sunburn and the remnants of a grass-allergy rash, but I also have these photos…

I did a few spring chores in the yard today. I mowed, which thrilled the robins.

Then I uncovered the ginger lilies. Last winter, we lost an entire bed of ginger lilies, who are more susceptible to cold than any of our other bulbs. I feared losing all the beds as snowstorm after snowstorm plowed through the area. Stung by last year’s losses, this year I have been determined to leave them insulated until well after our last “frost date”. They’ve had other plans, stubbornly growing through and under and around their protective layers. So tonight they are free.

It’s not just the ginger lilies. The tulips are ahead of schedule, too. We don’t have many tulips (six, to be exact), and they don’t seem to thrive in our yard. Some years, they don’t bloom at all. That’s not the case this year.

While working in the corner flower bed, I found a family of fresh-hatched spiderlings. (Look away!) I’m wretchedly arachnophobic, but these little motes hardly seemed like spiders. They were almost cute. I watched as they trooped across a tiny span of web, climbed the tallest iris, and floated away on gossamer sails. I wanted to wave goodbye. And wish them luck. And read Charlotte’s Web again.