We quiver inside our shocked fur

I've seen a half dozen hummingbirds in the last two weeks, enticed by my prolific red bee balm, one of which hovered in the air like a little AI creation, 18 inches from my face, and I swear looked me in the eye.

Oh the dinosaur blue jays, a crow mama and teenage baby calling for peanuts, dozens of sparrows startled out of the rain-dampened grass when I open the screen door, little goldfinches with their shockingly bright feather jackets, a woodpecker diligently working on the remains of the suet (previously ravaged, loudly, by starlings). 

When I look at the garden I see the holes where we need to plant more flowers (tis the season of yellow and red — I need more blue! more purple and pink! more white!). But if I list everything in bloom I'm stunned by it all. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Especially this past (long) weekend, when Stella and Ben visited and indulged us on an arduous canoe paddle and a wild and stormy boat ride out to Eastern Egg Rock to get a really good look at the puffins nesting there. We also spotted seals, porpoises, and many seabirds. In return, we indulged them with a perfect Red's Dairy Freeze score (4 for 4 nights). Plus there were lobster rolls, bocce, board games, an Eastern Prom food truck picnic, bubble tea, and used bookstores. And the back garden fauna was satisfying too: a rabbit* (first rabbit we've seen in our yard in 25 years); two skunks, flaunting their white-striped tails at twilight (we all yelled SKUNK!!); lots of squirrels.

Seen, but not captured on film, no matter how hard I tried:

Flashing sign at the corner of State and Congress: SNOW HAULING

Alarming the tourists since 1999:

Mark, to Ben and Stella, in line for the puffin cruise: "Did you hear about that humpback whale that flipped a boat over the other day?"

Up top we saw so many puffins!

Below deck there were bodies on the floor.

*I think it's a New England Cottontail

If a black bear attacks, do not play dead

Who pooped in my raised bed? Who keeps digging in there, amongst the volunteer strawberry plants?*

"People are advised to play dead and lock their hands behind their neck...in the event of a grizzly bear attack. If a black bear attacks, do not play dead." —Amanda Holpuch in the New York Times

I replaced all the good bird seed with unshelled black sunflower seeds to send the soft-beaked starlings a subtle message: Fuck off, friends. They descend to peck vindictively at the remains of the suet. The crows visit to caw at me periodically throughout the day; they've trained me to toss peanuts into the yard on command.

A few days ago, I pulled into the Back Cove lot to get a look at a giant wire art installation — two huge egret heads against the blue sky. In the Subaru parked beside me, a man was calmly eating food with a fork as a woman in the passenger seat leaned out the open car door and vomited on the asphalt. When she was done, she closed the door and they both swigged from a bottle of mouthwash, swished for a long time, and then simultaneously opened their doors and spit on the ground.

The song my brain sings whilst I sit on my parents' fancy heated toilet seat in late June: hot seat in the summertime, to the tune of this.

“To kill an eel, seize it with a cloth and bang its head violently against a hard surface.” — Larousse Gastronomique, 1938

*I devised a torture-chamber-looking method of diverting the pooper that involves take-out chopsticks and skewers. Watch this space for DIY slug murder and powdery mildew abatement.

Flooded with gracious light

"Too busy" to write on this blorg. 

I keep intending to call my dancer friend, but unfortunately she is in Spain and it always seems to be midnight there. The fact that she slept through that fabulous comet chunk makes me feel a little better about the fact that I slept through the northern lights.

We are piecing our back yard back together, slowly slowly, after losing two huge, stately trees. It looks less like an empty rectangle, bleakly immense, than it did two weeks ago. There are birds, and a faded forsythia, and bleeding hearts, forget-me-nots, rascally strawberries everywhere, violets, lilies-of-the-valley snuck over from next door. A bed of herbs growing inches overnight, especially after rain. We bought a serviceberry we'll pick up next week, and we're contemplating a dogwood. We're planning a pea stone patio, another garden bed, planning and planning as we sit on the dirty back steps with our morning coffee.

My "notes": 

Sweaty season commences, as evidenced by how everyone in Hannaford smells today.

"To pay attention is to love everything. To see the future as brightness." - Sarah Manguso

"It was early summer; everything was fresh and fair. The grass was green green; the sky was blue, immensely blue; the world was flooded with gracious light." - William Steig

Agree with these synonyms.

Be careful out there. I love you.

Rabbit rabbit!

 

Of all hidden things, I sing

And we'll not complain if it never stops at all

Minimalism in all things except reading glasses. And by that, I don't mean bejeweled frames, I mean that I apparently need a dozen pairs — in my bag, my coat pocket, in the car, in the kitchen*, bathroom**, down in the printing area, on my desk, beside my bed. Plus backups. Or maybe it's time for progressive lenses.

Okay, apparently it's going to rain for 40 days and 40 nights four days. Yesterday I divided some plants, planted some flower seeds, cleaned up some garden beds. I filled ten leaf bags with willow branches, pine needles, weeds, errant day lilies, and some leaves, then hauled them through the house*** and into the garage to keep them dry until my yard waste pickup day (Thursday). Then I'll haul them back out and put them on the curb. I've hardly made a dent in the collection of brush that expands through the year, mostly willow branches that blow down in every storm, piled behind the old playhouse (That's okay — the birds love it!). Speaking of the birds, Mark helped me move the bird feeders farther away from the pine tree in the corner of our back yard, since several squirrels recently tested their acrobatic abilities and discovered they could leap through the air from tree to feeder and suck the bird seed into their greedy mouths while hanging upside down. I don't think they can make it that far now, though I'm eager to see them try.

Can't believe the only thing I wrote in the entire month of April was this half-assed post about reading glasses and puttering in my yard , but would you get a load of these feet??

*reading recipes and labels

**tweezing and deciphering medicine bottles

***garage door — long story

There is trouble until the robins come

I regret to inform you that I found something in my back yard this morning that reminded me of the thing with teeth incident of 2016. Reader, it was a squirrel's tail with no squirrel attached to it. Now I will definitely live in fear of coming across its other body parts when I'm gardening. Mark is being way too reassuring: "No, it definitely ran off." WITHOUT ITS TAIL? IT RAN OFF TO SOMEONE ELSE'S BACK YARD, TAILLESS?

Right before I encountered the tail, I was delightedly following a butterfly, like a character in a David Lynch movie.

Compost bouquet.

More like the tipping of an object toward the light

Wednesday is my Busy Day™ so here I am looking out the window and thinking about how much I love a certain shade of yellow these days. I can see black-eyed Susans on one side, deep red lilies beside them, purple hosta spikes. And on the other, the potential of yellow in the massive field of goldenrod I somehow conjured in the front yard. Still to bloom! More summer to come! And the windows are open, and I have coffee, and a fan, and a yellow shirt my favorite person bought for me.

Hello, it's me. I've thought about yellow clothing for a long, long time.

In other news:

Sunblock In My Eye: the Liz Woodbury Story

(Again the mail carrier comes sidling between the hydrangea and the crazy native garden to deliver the mail, circling back to the sidewalk to make his exit. Does he notice all the monarchs dancing around the milkweed?)

THIS is how you write a headline, NYT.

100%

It's hard out there for a 60-pound fighting fish.

Each each other's animal again

Sarah brought me two little baby sweet pea seedlings, which I anxiously nurtured through the end of the winter and into the spring and then planted in a pot outdoors. I keep adding sticks and bamboo poles for them to wrap their tiny tendrils around as they grow taller like Jack's beanstalk. They're sort of humble, and they look like they'd fall over on their fine stems but somehow they don't; they're stronger than they look. Pale cream and pink and violet.

Oh yes, when I see the word "saucepan," it is pronounced in a British accent inside my brain: SUUSpin.

On this day in history: I had to reference NFTs in something for work. Also, "cryptocurrency." 

Make your nails look as smooth as Velveeta feels.

If I'm not worrying about the state of the country/world as I fall asleep, I'm picturing roots, the branching kind and the rhizome ones, the coy rugosa babies popping up here and there, looking so tender and innocent above ground while sneakily connecting to something wide and woody as a tree branch underneath the surface. Also, weevils on the roses and oleander aphids on the milkweed. Daily, I put on one disposable glove and squish the aphids, their tiny yellow bodies staining my gloved fingertips. I wear my reading glasses out in the garden, which means I move drunkenly from plant to plant but can see each little bug vividly and avoid harming the tiny monarch larvae under the leaves. I often startle my neighbors, crouched there in the plants. "Squishing aphids!" I called to one confused neighbor this morning. It's strangely satisfying, like popping caviar between your teeth.

The past few weeks in animals:

• Yellow oleander aphids
• Rose weevils, knocked into soapy water
• A ferret, held like a baby at the Pride festival
• A baby goat, also held in arms at the Pride festival, looking less happy about it than the ferret
• Primary-colored birds in my garden: cardinal, goldfinch, blue jay
• A little dog named Blossom
• Swallows dancing over the pond in Deering Oaks

Ouch.

No other earth to prepare for

Mark and Clover and I walked Adam and Charlie through the park the other night on their way home, and we heard a tiny brass ensemble, three musicians sitting on the sidewalk playing in the dark. Last night I had a dream in which I generously forgave a relative for their wrong opinion on Roe v Wade, grasping their hand with Jesus-like forbearance. The dream does not reflect my actual feelings on the issue.

I'm tired from listening to people talk, and a piece of my tooth broke off so now I definitely have to go to the dentist.* 

I found a plant sale, got up early on Saturday to drive almost an hour to buy three Virginia roses and lowbush blueberry and a hay scented fern and Joe Pye weed. Went by an artisanal Portland popup plant sale that was charging twice the price for teeny plants, so I resisted those. Next year I'm determined to start some from seed.

Hello from a work in progress and a patch of dirt upon which birds love to bathe.

*I have an actual appointment!

The tune your bones play as you keep going

February snow for us today, after a freak February fake spring Wednesday that reached nearly 65 degrees. I went out that afternoon with my long lopping shears and attacked the Rosa rugosa, carefully tossing the thorny branches over our tall fence into the back yard. I made it out nearly unscathed, just one fingertip embedded with the tiny spikes (my ferocious gardening regularly wears holes in my good work gloves). In the end, I took pity on one very small clump of rugosa, but I may reconsider and shear it to the ground (I should. I probably will). After the ground thaws, I'll dig up as many of the roots as I can...my eventual plan is to replace it with this and this and maybe this and this.

But I'm here now, and now there's dry snow rushing from the sky in clouds, greying the windows. We walked Clover over to Deering Oaks into wind that was shockingly cold, snow that felt sharp on our faces. She chased sticks up and down the hill, and we watched passing plows push plumes of snow into the air along the highway beside the park. The walk home put the wind at our backs. I was thinking about Ukraine the whole time, wondering what the weather is like there right now.*

Abominable Snow Dog

*It's raining lightly in Kyiv, and residents are barricading themselves in their homes, having been instructed how to make Molotov cocktails.

If you could take the day by the hand

Yesterday we accomplished so much and yet still managed not to cross off several top items on our to-do list, including removing the last air conditioner from the window and hauling all three to the basement. Imagining it still there on Thanksgiving is bringing to mind the time Mark brought home an old metal desk he found and left in in the back yard, as I pestered him for weeks about bringing it indoors. "Snow is going to fall on that thing,"  I predicted, and Reader, it did. 

I hacked mercilessly at the enormous patch of beach roses in the front yard in my new quest to tame them to a small, manageable shrub. I want to replace most of them with native stuff — maybe bayberry and blueberry and elderberry bushes. There's also a rose species that would be a nice substitute, Virginia Rose. 

Okay, off to have a Monday now. The sky is smoky gray at 7 am, very November. 

Whatever leads to joy, they always answer

Sitting outside with my coffee, thinking about blades of grass (we need to mow this stuff), and the first time someone showed me how to hold one between the curve of my two thumbs and blow it like a kazoo. Not that I can remember that moment, or who it was (my dad?), but that such a moment existed. And also the one where I first showed someone else how to do it (my brother? Zoë? some random kid I was babysitting?). I must be in a Mood, because it all made my eyes fill with tears.

Also, this dead bird I saw on the sidewalk, its little legs up in the air.

But I like the way this dew formed on top of morning cobwebs the other day, like party lights strung over the flowering thyme below.

De dew dew dew de da da da
Is all I want to say to you

Among the wildflowers

Gus died this week.

A woman jogged past my house yesterday, paused at one of our enormous overgrown beach rose bushes, pulled a single pink petal off, popped it in her mouth, and jogged off down the sidewalk.

Sweet little neighbor boys made us sympathy cards. "I'M SORRY CLOVER" said one of them.

It feels like he's still here somewhere. It feels like he's behind the forsythia bush, in front of the fireplace, under the porch. 

My new hobby is buying flowers and planting them in the many spots around the yard where he'd taken to spending most of his time over the last couple of months. That dog loved having a back yard he could defend with his loud barking and relax in all day, moving from one shady spot to another and even into the night if we'd let him. You could see him glowing slightly, settled in the middle of the garden behind the coreopsis or curled around a lily plant. 

Chamomile everywhere.

I'm not sure this spot is sunny enough for daisies, but it was sunny enough for Gus.

This was his usual spot, behind these yellow beauties. I think I need to get two more astilbes to fill in the dirt patch he created here, but this one really reminds me of him.

Delights

Inspired by Ross Gay's Book of Delights, which is delightful, here's a random sampling of mine today.

• I woke feeling much improved from yesterday, when I was knocked flat on my back by the previous day's shingles vaccine.*
• The blossoms in the vegetable garden, the way they seem deliberately intended to add color and cheer — comically huge, bright yellow zucchini blossoms and tiny paler tomato flowers and elegant white blooms on the snap peas.
• Gus, asleep with his back against the raised bed, guarding the garden. Guardian of the garden.

*If you're as old as I am or older, get your shingles vaccine.

Rabbit rabbit!

"May is white clouds behind pine-trees
Puffed out and marching upon a blue sky.
May is a green as no other,
May is much sun through small leaves,
May is soft earth,
And apple-blossoms,
And windows open to a South Wind.
May is full light wind of lilac
From Canada to Narragansett Bay."

from "Lilacs" by Amy Lowell

slowing time almost to a dream

Oh, summer, funny fleeting/lingering season! Season of cotton shirts and cats and flower dogs. Iced coffee, long drives, pebbly beaches and Mexican food in the woods. We've got our hands around this summer, and even though its end feels imminent, really there is an entire month of it left before Isaac starts school. And two weeks--two--until our Indian girl comes home!

Phantom

Just now, I was listening to NPR and heard a reporter's cell phone vibrating in the background while she chatted with Melissa Block (or possibly, it was Melissa Block's cell phone, but I seriously doubt it). Have you heard of phantom vibration syndrome, when a person thinks she can feel her phone vibrating but it's not? No, for real. It's a real thing. There are some days I'm afflicted (last week, for example, I was pruning our beach roses and put my pruning shears in my back pocket, and almost immediately had the sensation that someone was calling me via my pruning shears).

Sad news: my trusty old White sewing machine (handed down to me by my mom) has bit the dust. Our favorite sewing machine repair shop man told us there was nothing to be done, it's beyond fixing. I don't even understand what's wrong with it, but I am sad because that machine knew how to get the job done with no fanfare and just exactly the perfect tension on the stretchy cotton scarves I stitch. Mark found two cheap/free replacements: one is too new and feels all plasticky and wrong, but the other is the lovely old Singer pictured above. It's so basic, made of metal. I like the feel of it. You have to plug it in to turn it on, and unplug it to turn it off.

A happy thing: Mother's Day happened, and Isaac gave me a gift certificate to buy some plants, plus that excellent silver rake pictured below. And Zoë, who is lingering in upstate New York with her sweetheart before departing next Saturday for Mumbai, called me on the phone! And my mom and dad drove up for the day and we had  brunch together. It was really the first day I could eat like a normal person after my illness and followup antibiotics, so that was extra festive.

Isaac is playing the role of Trinidad and Tobago at the Maine Model UN conference for the next few days. He's pretty excited--he had a lot of fun being Kyrgyzstan last year. I miss that big tall boy when he's not around.

It gives me a chance, yet again, to contemplate my impending empty nest. What to do? More dogs? Sell the house and buy an RV? I keep thinking chickens, although I need to get Mark at least a tiny bit excited about that first.* In the meantime, here's what I'm doing with my quasi-empty nest: catching up on all the work I didn't do while I was sleeping 16 hours a day last week! Also, getting Zoë's room somewhat organized (everything from her dorm room is home, even though she's not). Also, eating half an avocado for dinner, and drinking a decaf homemade latte made with raw goat's milk, which is my secret non-vegan treat I like to buy myself in tiny containers from Lois's sometimes.

*Mark's dream tends toward "move to New York." Mine tends toward "start a small goat farm." Don't worry, we're both great compromisers.

Nemesis

No, it's not poison ivy (my true nemesis*), it's just the weed-which-shall-not-be-named (because I don't know what it's called). So let's just agree to call it NEMESIS WEED. It's everywhere in my yard, underneath everything, creeping under the fence and up in between the plants. I dream about this weed. I spend all summer battling it, and it is always victorious. The early spring this year is giving me an opportunity to get the upper hand, and I swear I will come out ahead this time.

We are working in the yard before it starts raining for forty four days and nights. Here's a typical yard work conversation:

Me: "Ooh, sorry!"
Mark: "What?"
Me: "I was talking to a worm."


*I have been known to get a poison ivy rash all over my face just from being in proximity to it, no exaggeration.


**Edited to add: Isaac is doing really well! If you are my Book-of-Faces friend, you have seen some gruesome photos of the blisters that rose on his hand over the past several days, enormous enough that I named them (Blisty and Mister Squishy). He has been back to the doctor twice for a change of dressings, and he'll have to go back at least once more, although after that first day the pain really subsided and he did not have to become addicted to oxycodone. Yay!