Tag Archives: dogs

Conversion

In a pre-Christmas issue of OnBeing’s newsletter, The Pause, Padraig O’Tuama tells a story from his late teens, a period of his life that he describes as “too interested in religion” and “too much zeal.” Working for a church in Dublin, he encountered an elderly woman in chapel nearly every day for five years. And every time, she would say, “I’m praying for you; for your conversion.”

He goes on to say how his initial dismay (“I was already converted”) evolved over time to a deeper understanding of conversion: “It is an embrace of the possibility of change and future. … It calls us again and again throughout a life.”

He might have said, It calls us to life—to a deeper, richer, more genuine life. 

In some contexts, conversion is seen in binary terms: yes or no, before or after, saved or not saved, sheep or goat. St. Paul is the prototypical example, to the extent that “Damascus Road experience” is a familiar idiom, even in the secular world.

In others, the pattern is more like that of St. Peter, conversion on conversion on conversion. Even after his uncomfortable post-Resurrection “little chat” over breakfast (“do you love me … feed my sheep”), even after Pentecost, we have the story of his dream on the rooftop in Joppa.

I have been blessed with many conversions over the course of my life. But I say “blessed” only after the fact. Conversion, in my experience, is not a pleasant thing to go through. Most of the time, when we say we are praying for someone, we pray for favorable external circumstances: May you get well, may you get the job, may you win the lottery, may your pain go away. To pray for another’s conversion is to wish pain onto them. Granted, a necessary pain that will lead to that deeper, richer, more genuine life, but pain, nevertheless. 

What a startling, presumptuous prayer! And one fraught with pitfalls for the pray-er. If I pray for your conversion, am I ignoring my own need to change? (E.G., May all you folks who voted the “wrong” way in the recent election come to see the light.) If I pray for your conversion, am I assuming that I know what you are in need of? I have repeatedly made the mistake of thinking I knew the particular way my spouse or child needed to change. And yet, more than one of my own conversions came at a wise and loving challenge from Nancy.

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On another front, signs of spring are all around. Shoots of the spring ephemerals are popping up through the leaf litter. The woods are full of birdsong. Nancy spotted a pair of red-shouldered hawks in the big pine tree below us.

As usual, the list of tasks we were going to accomplish over the winter is barely diminished. We did spend two afternoons crawling around under some rhododendron, pulling out the English ivy—a task I am only willing to do when it is too cold for the snakes and other critters to be active. In our observation, the ivy does not climb and cling onto the rhododendron and azaleas. And under the rhodies, the ivy was far less thick than just outside their reach. Too shady? Or does that genus somehow suppress ivy?

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A final aside: Here is a clip entitled “Mona Plays Basketball.”

Thanksgiving

I have been privileged on these cold and cloudless mid-November mornings to watch the daily purpling of the Cumberlands. My days begin when my dog pops her head over the side of my bed at daybreak, signaling “You are wasting daylight, and I have to pee.” To the north, the Cumberland escarpment is a uniform wall of deep blue, beneath a pale blue sky. By the end of our walk, however, the rising sun shines a red-tinted spotlight on the mountains’ face, and soon their ridged and folded topography is revealed, as the high places turn purple while the hollows remain deep blue.

For much of the year, only the mountain tops are visible to us, with the lower slopes hidden by the row of still growing tulip poplars that will someday cover the entire view. For now, their bare trunks and branches are almost black random mullions in our temporary window onto the full mass of these mountains—easy to look through and forget their presence.

If the wind direction is into the sunrise, the windmill tri-stars on Buffalo Mountain shine a brilliant white. On other days when they are turned oblique to the sun, they are hardly noticeable. Meanwhile, the ever higher sun lights up the nearer trees in the valley a yellow brown.

Now comes coffee. After trying several methods, we have settled on a slow pour-over. The ritual has become another nod toward mindfulness (and adding the used grounds to the compost bin is easier with this method than the messy disassembling of K-cups).

Settling into my easy chair with my coffee, I must choose: Will I start my day on a contemplative note, with my journal and/or a dose of Richard Rohr or Mary Oliver? Or will I succumb first to the blood-pressure raising siren call of the morning paper and news feed?

In any case, my time in the easy chair is limited. Mona needs to play, which she typically announces by dropping a tennis ball into my lap. Once, and only once, I snapped, “Go play with yourself!” and, as if I’d thrown a switch, she spun into her tail-chasing dervish mode. Mostly, though, she will charm me or wear me down until I get up and pay attention to her. 

Over the course of a day, we will have two or three sessions of chase-the-ball-down-the-hall; a couple of trips outdoors to harass chipmunks or race around with a nearly flat basketball that she scavenged from the woods gripped in her teeth; not to mention the four walks on a leash, poop bag in hand. The latter, pursued vigorously up our very steep street, double as my aerobic interval training. Our previous dog called me to Sabbath; this one calls me to action.

Our long-term project to replace the invasives on our property with wildlife-friendly native plants is slowly showing progress.  Our rogues’ gallery of undesirables has become a Ten Least Wanted: English ivy, Japanese stiltgrass, ground ivy, Italian arum, mulberryweed, Oriental bittersweet, privet, mahonia, Rose of Sharon, and poison ivy. The work of many of our days consists of removing one or more of these pests from some small definable patch of ground. 

Arum is Nancy’s current villain #1. Impervious to herbicides, it reproduces by means of tiny underground corms. Dig a plant up and it leaves many corms behind. Her current strategy is to do “Mohs surgery” around the mother plants, digging outward and down until all the visible plant is removed. Then wait a few weeks for the corms that were left behind to emerge and do it again. And again. And again. Her hope is that by preventing the emerging young plants from producing new corms, eventually the soil’s inventory will be depleted. It is grinding work. For each young plant that is visible, she will find a dozen underground. Fortunately, this is cool weather work and their bright green leaves are readily visible against the seasonal brown.

How to do this on the greater-than-45-degree slopes below our driveway? We use a climbing rope anchored to my truck, with a prussic knot allowing the harnessed digger to hold a position on the rope and work with both hands.

Some days, it seems we only tear down. Yet the work also includes building up after the tearing down. In woodland patches cleared of English ivy, long-suppressed native forbs are coming back, and the wood asters we planted are propagating. A strip of our stilt grass meadow, weeds smothered under a silage tarp for a year, was recently planted with a native wildflower mix. An American holly, rescued from a choking, cloaking tangle of Oriental bittersweet, displays its glossy foliage once again. We added The Hazels—a pair each of hazelnut, hazel alder, and witch hazel—to define the northern border of the meadow.

Woolly Aphids on Hazel Alder

Our hazel alders have white fuzzies. Tennessee Naturescapes tells me that is good news. These are woolly aphids, food of the caterpillar phase of the Harvester butterfly—the only carnivorous butterfly larvae in the western hemisphere. You can read here how these meat-eating larvae manage to co-exist with the aphids and the ants who “guard” them.

Mary Oliver wrote*:

“I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it nothing fancy. But it seems impossible.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

(*From “This World,” in her collection, Why I Wake Early.)

Blue and Other Delights

I am sitting on our deck in the middle of a perfect September day. The sky, and the Cumberland Mountains, are an astonishing blue. I recently had cataract surgery, and my renewed acquaintance with the color blue is a constant delight. I opted for the multi-focal lens implants, so am without glasses for the first time since second grade. But the color intensity is still the most noticeable change. It as if I’ve swapped all the 3000K LED bulbs for 4000K ones.

My vision had become uncorrectable with glasses, one eye much near-sighted, the other extreme in the other direction. It had become so bad that, when driving at night, by the time I was close enough to read a roadside sign, it was no longer illuminated by my headlights. Now, I am watching a hawk sail overhead, a mile or so out over the valley, then back again.

Another recent delight is our new dog. It has been almost a year-and-a-half since the last one died. Nancy has been chipping away at my reluctance for a while, noting that our grand-dogs don’t visit often enough to satisfy her need for a dog fix. She has been haunting the websites of dog shelters, and Jay has fueled the fire with his own web searches. Our new addition looks amazingly like our former one, who, in turn, looked like Nancy’s first dog. So, Mona iii has entered our lives. A rescue, about a year and a half old, seems to be a mix of border collie and lab. And way too much energy for a couple of geezers-in-training. But she is attentive, wants to please, and is a quick learner.

The third major event of our recent lives is the publishing of the first virtual performance of the Oak Ridge Community Band. How does a band keep playing while shut down for a pandemic? Earlier this summer, several small ensembles made recordings while spread out on our deck. Most recently, nearly forty musicians made video and audio recordings of themselves playing in isolation while listening through headphones to a click-track. The piece, “The Distance Between Us,” was composed by the band’s director, Shaun Salem, and honors all who suffer through this pandemic, by isolation and other losses. Nancy has spent the last couple of weeks in a frenzy of effort to merge all the videos and overlay them onto the merged audio track. You can see this virtual performance, and the small ensembles at the ORCB Facebook page.

Mona

We had to let Mona go last week. At 14 years, she had been showing her age. Declining mobility in her hindquarters put her on a daily regimen of pain killers and other medications. She always reminded us when it was time for her twice-daily doses and would hound us until we delivered—most likely because meds were served up with a dollop of peanut butter. (“A spoonful of peanut butter helps the medicine go down.”—Mary Pup-pins.)

Despite the meds, she’d sometimes fall down when in an awkward position, struggled to remain standing long enough to eat her kibble, and had recently reached the point being unable to climb the stairs from our basement. Yet, on her daily walks up the street, she would often insist on taking the long way around rather than turning back early. Later in the day, she would usually lead us down to the meadow, where, after a good poop, she would run and prance like a puppy. 

Pancreatitis was the last straw. After three days in doggy hospital, we had a choice: insert a new intravenous catheter and extend her stay, or do a “home trial” to see if she would rally in more familiar surroundings. Her night at home was agony. Of all the things we tried to ease her suffering, the most effective was to slip a sling under her and help her to walk out the driveway and around the cul-de-sac. The different position gave her some relief, or at least a distraction. On coming back inside, she would fall asleep for a time, until the pain took over again. We were back at the vet’s as soon as they opened. In her own way, she gave clear indication that she had had enough. Exhausted from the pain, she did not even protest at being back. Perhaps was unaware.

My most poignant memory of that last night is from one of those walks out the driveway. She stood and faced the meadow, inhaling the gentle upslope breeze, seemingly taking her leave of that beloved place. 

I have long been intentional, if not always faithful, in observing a set of disciplines—some daily, some weekly, some seasonal—what in monastic traditions is called a “rule of life.” As it happens, I am being aided in re-evaluating, renewing, and re-energizing my own rule of life, through two adult forum series at my church and through a secular series of classes given by the holistic medical practice of which I am a member. Mona had her own set of daily disciplines. Her day was not complete without a walk in the meadow and a nap on the sofa, resting her head on the thigh of one of her people. Not a bad rule of life. And since, for her, these were communal activities, they were a part of my own. From her earliest days, she was the dog who called me to Sabbath.

This year’s sequence of spring flowering has coincided with memorable dates. The snowdrops by the garage were in full flower on the early February birthday of our youngest son. The purple crocus by the mailbox appeared in sudden glory on Valentine’s Day. The daffodils in the meadow opened in splendor on the day Mona died. Her body rests in Mona’s Meadow, where her spirit still runs and plays.

From the (Frog) Front

Rainy Monday

In the photo, it’s a rainy Monday, and Mona longs to get outside. We did manage a brief foray into the front yard before the rain moved in, but she missed her long walk Sunday, and now she’s shut out by a mini-deluge. This image of her profile at the window is a familiar one, watching for perfidious squirrels and chipmunks and cats. What’s missing is Nancy at her frog-watching post (see tripod and binoculars at left). She’s behind the lens on this shot and cannot be in two places at once.

Competing male green frogs, Verdi (left) and Xeno (Right).

Xeno and Verdi are back. Nancy recognizes markings from last year. She also notes deepening of some markings as they move into their reproductive phases.

Xeno in Winter and Spring

Xeno’s still the bold one. As Nancy was changing the pond filter on Saturday, hands underwater, he pushed off shore heading towards her. Pausing right by her hand, he lingered long enough for her to reach up and touch his toes a few moments. Then he swam off to the other side.

The upland chorus frogs have bred and now are quiet. Some other species (so far not identified) were courting a few days ago and Nancy caught a pair in amplexus.

Unidentified Toads or Treefrogs in Amplexus

The green frogs (Xeno and Verdi and friends) are also into their season. We have heard Xeno’s familiar song.

The plant life around the pond is flowering also—figuratively in the case of the bellwort and Solomon’s seal and bleeding heart and just-emerging ferns, literally for the bluet and foam flower and wild geranium and coral bell and twin-leaf.

Bluets

Wild Geranium

It looks to be a good year for trillium, which are popping up in clusters, both in our garden and in the woods out back.

Sessile Trillium Luteum

The Lenten rose are done with bloom. While the seed heads are still pretty, they will soon spread seeds by the hundreds if I do not quickly remove them.

Bee in Lenten Rose

Bluebirds are nesting, and some chickadees were checking out another bird box last week.

Chipmunk Gets a Chewing Out

In this photo from a few days ago, Mona is chewing at the hollow log. Apparently she saw a chipmunk go inside. She’s usually ready to come back inside the minute her people disappear, but she stayed at this task for half an hour before giving up.

P.S.—Mona made up for lost walks today (Tuesday). We did our longest loop, four miles.

Of Chaos and Spring

Was it Luther? Somewhere I read something to the effect that he prayed for an hour each day, except on days he was especially busy—then he prayed for two hours. In that vein, perhaps I can justify taking some time to write.

My life is chaos. It is largely my own fault, and nothing that deserves your great sympathy. My desk is chaos, because of my own habits of procrastination and sloth. My shop is chaos, because (in addition to the aforementioned procrastination and sloth) in the midst of my latest project, my table saw’s blade raising and lowering mechanism failed, and I now have saw parts and tools layered over that project on the workbench and underfoot all over the floor. Our house is chaos because in selling the houses of my mother and Nancy’s parents, we have ended up with more stuff than anyone could possibly use. My “To Do” list is chaos because I have made commitments that I should have not made.

On second thought, as I look at the list, I do not regret any of the voluntary commitments. It is, for the most part, an exciting and life-affirming list. The To-Do’s I dread are involuntary, chief among them being the annual income tax flagellation.

The table saw has been a major setback. After scanning the on-line forums and evaluating my choices, I opted for an epoxy called J-B Weld. I knew that if I screwed up, there’d be hell to pay, but I was careful and as thorough as I knew to be. After applying the epoxy, I tested that the parts that needed to slide against each other would still slide, then laid everything aside for the epoxy to cure overnight. Alas! This morning when I tried to re-assemble, I couldn’t even jam the parts together, much less expect them to slide freely. Does J-B Weld expand on curing? Everything looks just as I had left it last evening, but I have lost a critical few thousandths of an inch in clearance. I will have to remove that from the polished aluminum casting with an abrasive. More delay in getting back to my projects. More tasks I have never done before and must learn on the fly. More opportunity to screw up and ruin what was a pretty good saw.

I need an attitude adjustment. Writing helps. Sitting here helps—sitting in a comfortable chair, watching my dog watching the life just outside our dining room window. Earlier this morning, that life included a flock of goldfinches splashing in the pond. Two days ago, the pond hosted a frenzied flock of robins (and a lone mourning dove) taking a post-winter bath. Bluebirds are nesting in the bluebird house. The upland chorus frogs are looking for love again—they’ve been sounding off for the past two nights. Spring is coming.

Turducken Trees and Other Thoughts on the Season

I am told there is a dish called turducken—a chicken stuffed into a duck stuffed into a turkey. The name came to mind when shopping for a new artificial Christmas tree. That industry seems to think it a good idea to combine multiple types of foliage in one tree—mixing tips of white pine, fir, spruce—a frucepine? We were almost forced to buy one.

We put up an artificial tree, largely because of allergies. I could extol other virtues, but you have heard all the arguments and have come down on one side or the other. I am not here to change your mind. We have reaped a quarter-century of use out of just two such trees.

Last year, when we plugged our tree in and noted the large dark section where yet another string of lights had failed, we felt it was time to buy a new tree. That’s when we discovered turducken trees. And no other choices.

We had hoped to upgrade to LED lighting, but the price was too steep, so we hauled home the least ugly of the incandescent-lit turduckens and unpacked our treasure. It was a day of thrill upon thrill. Somehow, the lights had been strung on this tree with the branches in the upright (folded for storage) position. There was not enough slack in the wiring to allow the branches to unfold. We re-boxed the turducken (mostly turkey at this point) and used part of the refund to buy yet another supplemental string of lights to stuff into the dark places on our old tree. We’d make it last one more year.

Fast forward to last weekend. An even larger dark section greeted us this year. Again, the question, Is this the year? Again, the trip to Home Depot. We found the turducken fad still alive and well. But, this year there is choice. And the price of LEDs has fallen. We scored a new, LED-lit, mono-species, fake tree. Sometimes, it pays to wait a year.

Waiting. That’s what we do in Advent. Liturgically, that is part of what the season tries to teach us. Wait. Anticipate. Long for. With faith and patience. But it is a hard lesson, one never fully learned.

We went to visit my mother recently. At a coffee stop, I was watching the baristas—how fast they worked, how they juggled to keep the inside line and the drive-through moving! I was grateful to not have their job, their stress. At the same time, I realized that I was also getting restless, slightly irritated—Why is this taking so long? Waiting. It will take a few more Advents for me to learn that lesson.

During our visit, Nancy’s Advent word-of-the-day site served up “Be.” To be, not to act, is another take on the waiting that Advent requires of us. Just be present and attentive. It is a lesson especially appropriate to visits with Mother. There is not much to be said, not much to be done. We sit together, sometimes just reading, napping, or watching the birds outside her window.

This weekend, Nancy and I are dog-sitting. Like our Mona, the “grand-dog,” Wonton, was rescued from the pound. He’d ended up there after the previous owners were caught up in a drug bust. He’s a big, exuberant sweetie. He’s missing his folks. Like our Mona, he needs his loving cup topped up often. A nap on my lap is just the ticket. So here we sit, 70-pound Wonton snoring on my lap and Mona napping beside Nancy. These dogs can teach us a thing or two about Advent.

P.S.—I took the old tree outside and extracted the supplemental strings we had added over the years as the originals failed. Four strings, all still working, totaling 300 lights.

Let’s Go To The Woods!

Behind our house is a deep wooded cove running the length of our street and separating us from the rear neighbors by about four hundred feet. Our side of the cove is almost ravine steep, while the far side is gentler, so the wet weather stream that carved this cove is nearer our street than it is to the street behind us. Our property line, while near the horizontal midpoint, is well up the opposite slope.

We have almost no back yard; the woods of our cove come nearly to the back of the house. From our rear windows we watch deer, squirrel, chipmunk. We hear, then see, the pileated woodpecker flashing tree to tree. We hear owls. We watch the progress of the seasons, noting the specific day on which the spring leafing-out suddenly hides the houses behind us. We watch the stream braiding across the flat cove bottom during and after a heavy rain.

From my second story study window, I can see the forest floor littered with downed trunks. We have lived here a quarter of a century, and most of the deadfall still visible has fallen during our tenure. I remember those trunks as standing timber, and they tell much of the history of our association with these woods. A few are oaks, killed by lightening. Most are pines, or the victims of pines.

When we moved here, pines represented a small but noticeable portion of the canopy. Most have fallen, their roots simply unable to keep them aloft. We had an arborist on site shortly after one fell and he affirmed that the tree had been healthy. I don’t know if it is their natural life cycle to get tall and fall, or if perhaps the maturing hardwoods around them change their roots’ ability to grip the soil. For what ever reason, one after another of our stately and seemingly healthy pines has fallen. We had the few that remained preemptively cut down to control the hazard.

In one notable case, a falling pine lodged in a white oak. It was a wet season and, before we could have the pine removed, it had pushed the oak into a large tulip poplar, which itself then leaned farther. Ultimately, that pine pushed down six sizable hardwoods in a line stretching two thirds of a football field from its base and spanning the bottom of the cove.

The back of a neighbor’s lot was once mostly pines, until pine bark beetles killed them all. On one not-notably-windy day, Nancy heard crash after crash from that part of the woods. Later investigation showed that the dead pine trunks had nearly all fallen or been snapped off high up, like some cultic mass suicide. The forest floor was littered with newly downed trunks. Most frightening were the trunk sections that had done a 180 or even a 360 in their descent, diving stunts that left fifteen foot sections planted upright in the soft ground.

Those woods have always been a playground for us. That first year, we built a “fort” at the bottom of the cove for my two boys to use—a two-story affair topped with a tarp in pup tent configuration. Straddling the stream bed, its first floor was two feet above the ground level, reached via a drawbridge from the steep side of the cove. Occasionally my sons would sleep out in the fort. I remember one night all four of us were on its upper deck, watching a deer just below us coming to the stream for a drink.

When we moved in, there was just one path down into the woods from our yard. It went straight down the slope. That was convenient for dragging the lumber for the fort down the hill, but misery for coming back up, not to mention the erosion potential. So we soon began laying out alternative routes using switchbacks. Over the years, various tree falls have necessitated slight alterations, but our original paths are still largely intact.

We use these paths almost daily. Mona and I take long walks on neighborhood streets more days than not, probably logging 400-500 miles a year. But even after a three mile morning walk, she will typically get restless in the afternoon. “Let’s go to the woods!” I’ll say, and she’s alive with anticipation. She will take off down a path, scaring up squirrels, chipmunks, occasional deer. In the woods, she can be free of her leash, roaming freely. She never strays, always staying within eyesight.

Pumpkin, our first dog, I also associate with these woods. She was a skinny stray, abandoned and hungry, watching us build the fort. She was pumpkin-colored, and came to us at harvest time. After we’d adopted her and filled out her ribcage, we had to keep her on a leash in the woods. She was a runner, liked to come home an hour later after a good roll in deer scat.

Twenty-five years of these woods. One dog’s lifetime, and more than half of her replacement’s likely lifespan.

Mona and I used to walk some of the downed tree trunks, ’til the good ones rotted too much for safe footing. I slipped off one of the huge rootballs once. Wet weather. It crumbled underfoot and I ended up flat on my back in the watery hole from whence the rootball had come, briefly stunned, wet and cold. Now I carry my cell phone, and think of my age before embarking on acrobatics.

Nancy, too, uses these paths often. With camera in hand, or just with Mona. We wage a one-family war on poison ivy, English ivy, vinca minor, privet. We gage soil moisture by where the dry stream bed becomes wet, enjoying watching water boil up through small underground passages. We scratch through the gravel beds newly deposited after a major storm.

Over a quarter-century, with near-daily familiarity, you notice changes. Falling trees open up the canopy and then it closes again. The understory changes. Small plots of various ferns and trillium wax and wane with the changes overhead. The past several years have seen our Mayapple area expand ten-fold. Our one patch of bluet shrank to nothing as the canopy closed. It will be interesting to see if it re-emerges this spring; we had to have a large, lightning-damaged white oak felled, re-opening the old bluet site to the sky.

I called the woods our playground. Exclusively ours, it seems. Once in the woods, several acres of forest are open to our enjoyment. None of the neighbors seem to know they exist. We’ve never encountered another person in this playground. In twenty-five years, I’ve heard children’s voices down there only a handful of times, with the exception of my own boys. Seen evidence of children’s play even less, except for paintball hulls, mostly shot from the “safety” of a back deck. Even our youngest had little interest in playing there. This is more than surprising to us. Both Nancy and I grew up spending many happy hours in our own wooded playgrounds. The alleged “nature deficit” of today’s children seems real in my neighborhood.

Time and weather took their toll on our fort, and no one was using it anymore, so we removed it. The corner poles and some of the better flooring got repurposed; the rotted stuff hauled to the landfill. Today, the only evidence of the old fort is a small bench fashioned from part of the drawbridge substructure. I think we have been good stewards of our small piece of nature. We’ve intended to be. We will probably walk those paths until our bodies give out, and then watch from our windows.

Twelve Degrees and Garbage Day

Grrrr!

Twelve degrees and the dog needs a walk. I get dressed, pull on my heaviest coat, gather gloves and poop bags, attach her leash and start up the driveway. A neighbor’s truck alarm is honking. Mona pulls back. Is she going to refuse to relieve herself on account of the noise? I pull her again, but she refuses, so I unsnap the leash and walk back down the driveway.

“Let’s go to the woods!” She assents, we begin down the path, and suddenly, bang, squats right in the middle of the path! What is it with this dog? I thought they were smart enough to not soil their own nest. Grrr! She must have had a real need. At least our time outdoors was short.

It’s garbage day. So, still wrapped in my cold weather gear I rush around, emptying trash cans. As usual, the kitchen one and the recycle bin are overflowing. Grrr! Why empty when they get full midweek? Just add another jar or cereal box. Dad will empty it in three more days.

I’m sweating inside my heavy coat by the time I’m done. For some reason, Nanci Griffith’s song, “Ten Degrees and Getting Colder,” comes to mind, with those intriguing lines:

He sat down at her table and they talked about the weather,
Ninety-eight point six and rising …

Hmmm!

Observations on the End of Summer

We are blessed, this last week of August, with a foretaste of autumn weather—low temperatures, low humidity, and clear blue skies. Today was a pleasant day for weeding, and Nancy and I pulled three large trash bags full. Also a pleasant day for the dog and I to take a long walk. We have several main loops and many variations, ranging from one to five miles. Today Mona pulled me into the longest one, the one with a stretch of gated-off utility access road on which I can remove her leash and let her roam.

An earlier signal of the end of summer is the return of the goldfinches to the dead seed heads in our coneflowers. From the first of August, walking out of the house or pulling into the driveway triggers flashes of yellow as the finches chitter off into the safety of tall trees. This year they have been especially present, in the flowers and drinking from the cup of water atop Nancy’s hummingbird feeder (the ant-stopping moat) just outside our dining room window. One morning as I ate breakfast, I was treated to repeated yellow flashes, lower right to upper left (coneflower garden to neighbor’s trees) culminating in a twister-like display as two spiraled around each other up into the forest. Fighting over a mate or food source? Or just a dance of delight?

Over the weekend, as I tended the compost bins, I uncovered two small snakes in the leaf pile. With some research, I identified them as juvenile black rat snakes. Apparently, what I have been calling a black snake could be either a black rat snake or a black racer. My weekend sighting gives me hope that the snake who met his/her end entangled in my bird netting (see previous post) left progeny behind who will continue the good fight against field mice and chipmunks and other vermin.

It has been a good summer for gardening. Not too wet, not too dry, not too hot. Some plants have inexplicably died, but others have thrived as never before. The deer have been merciful, the blooms long-lasting. Cosmos and hosta are still spectacular. And Nancy seems to have found a solution to the string algae that plagued her pond last summer. A single water hyacinth has multiplied and totally changed the nature of the pond, from a scum bucket to a prolific frog habitat.