Summer doldrums?

No rain yet. NOT A DROP, despite intermittent weather forecasts to the contrary. Lots of storms on the radar to our south, west and northwest. The Better Half even watered out front this morning and that didn't precipitate precipitation. But it has been a cloud-covered sky all day so we’re weary of dreary, at least I am.

Spotted Horsemint (Monarda punctata)

Photo by J. Harrington

The hill behind the house is brightened by several patches of spotted horsemint. Local ditches and marshes are showing more and more blooms of purple loosestrife. It would be nice if the geese evolved to eat the loosestrife and the whitetail deer evolved to eat buckthorn, but that’s not likely to happen in time to be beneficial to the rest of the local ecosystem. Maybe someone could look into crossbreeding goats with whitetail deer? Meanwhile, we’ve reached the time of year when I’ll look for the black berries on the female buckthorn and use the tractor to pull at least some of them, especially when and if the temperatures drop.

Once again I’ve spent more time in the house this summer than is good for me. Smoke, heat, humidity, biting bugs and severe thunderstorms have added up to inhibit my ambitions to be out and about and doing. Now, if only I show enough sense to ease into a more active pattern rather than overdo it and then have to sit around semi-crippled for a couple of days. (Of course the fact that I keep getting older has nothing to do with decreasing energy and ambition, right?) I don’t remember ever looking forward to going back to school in the autumn, but I did, on occasion, develop August ennui some years.

August

by Mary Oliver

When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.

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