Deer me, it's those lazy, hazy,...days of Summer

Despite being long-time fans of Nat King Cole, we left "crazy" out of today's title because it's all concentrated in politics and we're (temporarily) fed up with and sick of that. However, the Las Angeles Review of Books has a longish essay, Learning to Live in the Dark: Reading Arendt in the Time of Climate Change, that's very much worth a read for both environmental and political reasons. We commend it to your attention.

Now, the local weather forecasts have been predicting showers or thunderstorms for today, but we've seen nary a drop here so far. We've been enjoying a languid, listless day that's a handful of degrees short of sultry. For all too brief awhile yesterday evening, we got to watch a whitetail doe feeding under the pear tree, backlit by the late day sun. She remained completely undisturbed when we let SiSi out to make a puddle. By now some of the local critters seem to have figured out that the blond lab mix (SiSi) is basically harmless while the border collie mix thinks he's entitled to herd the world and everything in it and is not to be tolerated.

whitetail doe at pear tree in Summer

Photo by J. Harrington

Where and when we were growing up in Massachusetts, creatures like deer and turkeys were nonexistent to rare and exotic. The fact that they're much more common in what's been our "back yard" for the past quarter century or so makes them no less beautiful and enjoyable to watch. We're not even close to taking their presence for granted, although the Better Half and the Daughter Person are getting irritated at the whitetails nibbling rose bushes and clematis. Personally, we're more concerned at the amount of black chokeberry bushes we planted that the deer keep foraging on. We liked the chokeberry jam the one year we had enough berries to harvest. That was the first year the bushes were growing here. Since then, nada! Given a choice between a life without whitetail fawns and chokeberry jam, we know which we can go without.

Summer of the Ladybirds

By Vivian Smith

Can we learn wisdom watching insects now,

or just the art of quiet observation?

Creatures from the world of leaf and flower

marking weather’s variation.

The huge dry summer of the ladybirds

(we thought we’d never feel such heat again)

started with white cabbage butterflies

sipping at thin trickles in the drain.

Then one by one the ladybirds appeared

obeying some far purpose or design.

We marvelled at their numbers in the garden,

grouped together, shuffling in a line.

Each day a few strays turned up at the table,

the children laughed to see them near the jam

exploring round the edges of a spoon.

One tried to drink the moisture on my arm.

How random and how frail seemed their lives,

and yet how they persisted, refugees,

saving energy by keeping still

and hiding in the grass and in the trees.

And then one day they vanished overnight.

Clouds gathered, storm exploded, weather cleared.

And all the wishes that we might have had

in such abundance simply disappeared.

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