Frogs and Ravens

Summer Malaise

It's very quiet around here. The library is quiet, the town is quiet, the house is quiet. Life does keep moving along, but with the exception of a bit of fair-related hoo-rah and a haircut, it's been slow. The plants in the garden are producing things, but -- you guessed it -- slowly. I've befriended a cat (maybe). I'm being a lazy ass and not writing like I should. I've been cramming Japanese and sorting digital photos. The house is a mess. The lawn is tall. I'm sleepy and prone to slowly scratching the itchy spots that appear as a result of invisible mosquitoes. I'd say it's boring, but I'm too lethargic to be bored.

Yawn.

Huh-ZAH!

Finally! It is RAINING today! Fingers crossed that this breaks our heat wave, at least for a while!

Bees, Flies and Wasps

Though I'm feeling confined by the heat, it does not seem to bother the insects one whit. The cicadas are singing louder than ever, and the air around the plants is filled with buzzing, whirring forms.

I've been surprised by how many flying bugs there are here. Setting aside the cicadas and the beetles (many, many beetles) it seems like everytime I go out to my plants, there is a new flying creature to observe.

On the sunflowers there are mostly bumblebees and what I've been calling "mini-bees" because they resemble honeybees at half the size. I haven't seen hardly any proper honeybees, and those have been mostly in the clover in the lawn. As a result I'm quite grateful to any insects engaging in pollinating activity. The melons in particular benefit from the attentions of a small, shiny, dark-green fly-like creature that just adores their flowers. Sometimes tiny jewel-like flies, in metallic red or leaf green stand on the leaves too. So far, happily, none of these have shown any interest in the leaves themselves; that seems to be the purview of earwigs and leaf-hoppers. (Both of these adore the poor sunflowers; the former burrow into the flower heads, the latter attach their oddly-shaped bodies to the veins of leaves, attracting hordes of ants in their wake to the punctured, sap-leaking wounds.)

Not engaged in pollination, but impossible to ignore, are the wasps. There are a lot of wasps, and most of them are interested in the unfinished wood of the deck and trellis; they grind their jaws along it, leaving pale brown lines of unweathered wood, as they harvest pulp from which to construct their papery nests. Most are your classic yellow-jacket wasp, long and thin and bright yellow and black. There are also larger, calmer red-and-black wasps. Once I saw something that looked like a large red honey bee, bent on depositing something in the stems of the zuchini (which have yet to produce a single fruit successfully, so if it is a parasitical larva, no huge loss). Around campus there are large wasps called "cicada killers"; we were sent an email telling us not to be freaked out by them.

From where I am sitting a see a large wasp, as long as the first joint of my thumb, resting on the warm pavement. One of the cicada killers, perhaps? It is happy in the heat, unlike me, safely caged inside.

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c/o Shakespeare's Sister.

Hot

It is hot.

Meltingly hot.

Hot like the humid breath of a giant dog. Breathing on me.

Yawn. Sleepy.

Hot.

Crampy.

Lethargic.

Zzzzzzz...

Observations - July 11th

The weather has been changeable the past few weeks, alternating weeks of afternoon storms with those of long warm days. I took advantage of the latter to water and fertilize my porch plants -- which are busy making melons, tomatoes, and beans -- and rued the lack of the mower.

The orange daylilies are quieting, the fireflies are still making evening appearances, and the cicadas have returned. I remember asking D. sometime last year about when they showed up, and he couldn't tell me -- they were inextricably linked with summer days in his mind, noteworthy only when they stopped their buzzing, like when one notices the silence in the wake of a refrigerator turning off. Now, though, I can pinpoint their arrival: this year, the cicadas began to sing on July 6, 2006.

Otherwise, things are quiet and slow. One possible exception are the squirrels. There are three of them, I believe a mother and two siblings, and they come to our porch to duke it out over the corn. There is a clear hierarchy among the squirrels, and when they are together it helps me tell them apart. There is the mother squirrel, who is large and fierce, and not tolerant of younger squirrels infringing on her corn chewing. If they get too close, she runs at them, at top speed, sometimes making them fall off the railing in their anxious haste. Once the one I think of as male (for no good reason) wasn't paying attention when she rushed at him, and she caught him and bit him until he squealed. I felt sorry for him, partly because he is my slight favorite; he is more curious and playful than the other two and sometimes stares at me intently through the front porch window. The third squirrel, which I think of female (again, for no good reason) is mid-sized between the other two, and has a white spot on its chest. It is not as playful as its sibling, but much more adventurous than its parent. All three are absorbing to watch.

Today is thick and steamy. It's not as hot as it has been some days -- this morning felt like Oregon, being cool and damp and drizzly -- but you certainly note the tropical thickness and the richness of scent of the air on so moist a day.

Lanced Like a Boil

Sorry, that's a rather disgusting metaphor. But it does convey a bit of what I've been feeling with regards to the lawn of late. As you recall, I was away for a week. Then the week I was back, it rained nearly every day, until I killed all the lawn-mutilating equipment in the house. Then we went away for another week.

The lawn has been giving me fits ever since. The clover took over. The non-grass plants shot up tall seed heads. It began to look not only like a rental house's yard, but a student's rental house's yard.

I began obsessing about the lawn, and how unkempt it was, and how it was going to be two weeks until the mower came back from Sears, and how the neighbors must think it looks awful, and, and...

Poor D. He's had to put up with me obsessing about the lawn for days now.

I don't know why it bugs me so. It's not like I, personally, have anything against a wildish lawn. I am, after all, growing weed patches in the backyard, big, luxuriant weed patches. Put it down, I suppose, to an overactive sense of social disapproval. It's like worrying about one's messy house, except that it's out there, in public, growing worse every day. Gah.

Today the pain ended. After seeing a notice in the campus classifieds, I arranged for a local couple to come mow the lawn. They showed up with their tow-headed son (who rode on his daddy's lap on the big riding mower) and went at it with riding mower, gas push mower, and trimmer. I kept peeking out the windows at the activity with a big grin on my face.

Yay! I can walk outside without shame again! The lawn has been mown!