July 26 - July 31 Blue Summer

 
2010-Suddenly the chicories along the roadsides have come into a second, fuller flush of bloom, accompanied now by the delicate Queen Anne’s Lace.  Great clouds of deep lilac blue that always suggests something Virgin Maryish to me.  At the same time, the blueberries are in full fruit and, having with constant vigilance and frequent repair managed to keep the bird netting functional, I am picking almost a quart a day. The two blues together fill my eyes and I feel, in that color, I am touching the true heart of summer.
2012-Getting ready to go to the beach for a week just as the garden has come into full-tilt production. We’ll be leaving many blueberries behind as well. The rains have brought everything out of a kind of heat stressed hibernation and everything-the corn!- just shot up a foot and has become thick and lush. The hummingbirds are going wild and I can barely keep the feeder full. My experiment in summer bird feeding ended when a bear came and crunched my feeder into little pieces.
2013-The blueberries, apples and wild plums are plentiful this year. This fall L and I will get a chance to try out our new cider press and I’m hoping to make plum wine.
After recently being assured that science was just a step away from completing our understanding of the universe, I read that a modified gravity theory threatens to force us to rewrite our understanding of cosmic structure from scratch. So it seems this world invites us to discover endlessly, but never, or only foolishly, to know. Can it be that falling in love with not knowing is the key to happiness here?

July 21 - July 25 Summer Turns Yellow

2010-The  goldenrod is blooming (also early?) and the garden is over-arched by a giant pale yellow sunflower tree that seeded itself. Even the leaves seem yellowish, having lost their early summer emerald. it’s a color that suggests maturity and the hard won peace that comes from weathering experience: not by any achievement but just by dint of surviving.
I can’t stop thinking about time, sitting staring at my embroidered perpetual calendar, running my eyes over the circling round of months. I feel time just flowing through my fingers-it’s an actual physical sensation, a rushing that won’t be stopped. And the fruitless endless pondering of what might be the point.
2012-Finally a whole night and day of steady drenching rain. Having achieved some success in the garden I can begin to see the struggle against nature that earlier this season seemed like a war, as a struggle with nature-an intense form of interaction. So the garden becomes the fruit of this collaboration.
The daylilies are over, a shorter season no doubt due to the week of intense heat. It looks like we are in for a week of normal summer weather-hot(but not too) days and cool nights. What a treat.
I saw one little bat last night before I was driven inside by mosquitoes.
2013-
In wet grass, Frog meets
Impersonal lawnmower.
Sun’s indifferent face.

July 16 - July 20 Black-Eyed Susan Blooms

2010-I am preparing to go to the beach for a week, our family’s annual collective excursion.  The timing is good this year.  There is something about the seaside in summer, most likely the seeming constancy of sand and sea and sun, that appears to hold time suspended and lets me at least sample a small taste of what used to feel like endless summer.  At the same time it feels hard to leave behind the vegetable garden, just beginning its peak production, the nectarines that are threatening to ripen all at once in my absence, the potted plants that require daily watering and the lawn that so easily grows out of control.  Also this year I am way behind in my principal chore of scraping and painting the garage. It is a strange idea this vacation from one’s life, but probably a good exercise in focusing on the moment, in letting go.  And come on, it’s not exactly a hardship.
2012- We finally had a decent night of rain and now the hot weather has resumed. There are more chances of rain in the forecast but no way of knowing I they will really occur. Still I have a small break from the constant watering. A yellow swallowtail on the purple butterfly bush; three monarchs on the Echinacea. Something in me says “trust nature”. Can I do that?
2013-Thinking about cycles and patterns.  There’s this pattern of  hot humid spells followed by more typical summer weather, the pattern of rainy summers over a couple of years then back to dry--seeing weather as all about the planet self-regulating. If the more frequent and violent storms are part of  Gaia’s effort to regulate what is being pushed out of whack. the question is can the earth regulate what we’ve done/are doing? Or are we seeing the wobbling of the top as it loses momentum?

July 11 - July 15 Much Ado About Strawberry Preserves or Less is More

                                                               Indigo dyed yarn drying


2010-Either the chicory was early this year or the Queen Anne’s Lace was late, but finally they are appearing together along the roadsides.  Some years they are accompanied by purple loosestrife which is one of my favorite nature made arrangements.  I saw some loosestrife along the road on the way back from Boston, but not around here.  Perhaps the non-native eradication program is working.  In any case, the Mary-blue and frilly white roadsides are the wall paper for high summer. The desire to stretch these days out o their maximum is accompanied by a sort of growing horror at the shortening of days.  Only twenty minutes less than the maximum of the solstice, I try to reassure myself, but I know that the pendulum is gathering speed. There is an actual ache in my heart in anticipation of summer’s end. It is certainly partly a product of the school calendar and now that I am free of that I would like to be able to accept the movement towards winter, the ‘rising yin ether’ with more than good grace; actual full acceptance.  Meanwhile, I try to spend every possible minute outside.
2013-Hardly any Queen Anne’s Lace yet, this year it’s chicory with something low and yellow-hop clover maybe. I never saw the two together before.
When you finally ‘grok’ something, it’s hard to communicate because everything you can think to say about it is a cliché or at the very least, self-evident.  You are what’s different because now you get it. This was all precipitated by a batch of strawberry jam I made after gathering quarts of berries at an organic farm a couple of weeks ago. I don’t really have a sweet tooth and prefer bitter marmalade to jam when I use anything like that at all. But here were all these berries and I had to do something, so I tried a low temperature, low sugar, reducing method-kind of like sun preserves but in a low oven. It was absolutely incredible, concentrated strawberry flavor, dark in color and with some natural tartness still remaining.  So I had a jar of this amazing stuff that I made myself from berries I picked-special and unique in a way money can't buy. All the wanting people have for stuff was revealed to be exactly because they don’t have it, once it’s acquired, the next thing has more allure. But this was the preserve I had and at the same time the only one I wanted and it struck me so deeply as a lesson in how to look with gratitude and appreciation at everything I have. It actually felt like a miracle.

July 6 - July 10 The Earth Shakes

                                                           
                                           Bucket o' slugs handpicked from the garden 2009

2010-There was an earthquake in Canada that was felt all the way down here.  But not by me.  I didn’t even hear about it until a week or so later. We forget that the earth is neither solid nor stable and easily manage to live as if it were. Also as if our self important little lives were never going to end. What, if anything, about our existence is not illusion?
2011-Two more days and it will be a month without significant rain. Once a day (rarely twice) is taking care of things-doing much better this way than with too much rain. The potatoes and favas are ready to harvest though I’ve been too busy with company to get to them. The blueberries are excellent this year-huge and abundant.
2013-
Four slugs meander
Through window condensation.
Wipe off that message!

Two plus surplus inches of rain this month, over seven for the year (which started with a deficit). The slugs in the garden have been entirely replaced by snails. These pale gold creatures do as much damage as slugs but are much more attractive to look at. But there has been a slug problem in the garden here for over twenty years and suddenly they disappear to be replaced by something new. Why? What a mystery.

July 1 - July 5 Daylilies Flourish

 2010-Daylilies of every kind, both wild and cultivated are exploding in garden and roadside.  The variety of their color diverging from the original orange speaks to man’s involvement, while the form of their flowers suggest the trumpeting of summer.  At the same time, a handful of crimson ash leaves strew the ground down at the studio.

Tiny gold birch leaf
Nestled in fragrant leaf mold,
So early to fall.

It came to me in meditation, that all our seeking, both scientific and spiritual, is really the desire to expand our seeing and understanding to the next or fourth dimension.  Our ‘sin’ is really just our limitation. Like the mosquito’s ignorance of the hand that strikes it, or the hummingbird’s of the being that supplies and fills the feeder, we see so little of what exists.  I used to know this all the time but I keep forgetting.
2011- The fern seemed to suggest that things are more simple with it than I was trying to discover.  It’s just happy to see me.

I’ve been photographing the nest whenever the mother leaves in order to know when the eggs hatch. Yesterday evening I noticed the bird seemed more active than usual and I reached in and up to snap a picture (it’s over my head). They’re hatched. The light was already dim and they’re a little blurry but today I should be able to get a clear picture.
Five inches more of rain than normal this season.  The vegetable plants seem lusher for it but I wonder if they will produce without more sun and heat. The lettuce has been perfect and still not bitter though it is beginning to bolt.
2012-Now that the garden is beginning to produce-collards, fava, kale, chard, lettuce, arugula, even the first baby patty pans-I feel that the war has subsided into an uneasy co-existence. I still go out to the garden with my heart in my stomach, fearful of what damage I will discover today, but it has been minimal though there are tunnels underlying everything.
There has been one perfect summer day after another, lovely cool nights, but when even perfection goes on and on it becomes too much. There was no rain for well over a week- not one of the constantly predicted intermittent thunderstorms actually materialized and the ground contracted into a parched, cracked cement. Last night finally it rained a bit-not enough to leave any water in the container dishes, but enough so that the surface soil in the garden was damp all over this morning. A feeling of relief for all sentient creatures.
2013-
A golden child danced.
When did I forsake myself?
Tiger lily nods.

June 26 - June 30 Cicadas Sing

                                                   Help!


2010-If not for this period’s designation, I would not have recognized the cicada’s trills for what they are--they just blend in with the general bird sounds. A case of useful knowledge that increases the beauty and complexity of the world and enlarges my connection with it.  Not so with most of what passes for information these days; more background noise.
The chicories are glowing Mother Mary blue, celestial, all along the roadways.  I remember that they are usually accompanied by masses of Queen Anne’s Lace, but not this year.  Generally I see them standing alone, occasionally mixed with daylilies.  It strikes me as though some master hand was constantly experimenting with new arrangements.  And where are the Queen Anne’s Lace?  What are they waiting for?
2011- The new arrangement for this year is orange daylilies amid armfuls of elderberry flowers.
I have been watching and photographing a nest of robins in the yew bush.  A pair first came a month ago and built the nest and while the female sat the eggs the male was constantly back and forth with food.  The babies hatched and in ten days were fledged and gone.  Then, a week ago, I noticed more robin activity around the nest and thought maybe the babies had come back for a visit.  But it was the mother laying another nestful of  eggs--I didn’t know they did this.  This time though she seems to be on her own; no male bringing food and so from time to time she needs to leave the nest to find some for herself. (I took advantage of one of her trips out and got a beautiful photo of three blue eggs.) Single parenthood in the bird world?
I got a slight impression from the fern which I think is real because its so different from what I would have expected; a kind of airiness and lightness.  I’ll try sleeping with a piece and see if I can dream something.
2012-The scale attacking the citrus trees has become severe. The honeydew they leave has all turned black with mold and the stems and backs of leaves are studded with scale of all sizes. Apparently, without treatment, the infestation will worsen even to the point that the plant dies. How can this be part of a plan-how can it help the scale if they kill their host? I treated them with a pyrethrin spray and tried washing one with alcohol soaked cotton balls-a tedious process, but maybe I can save them. They, along with the bay that was the original host, have put out masses of new leaves and buds and show every sign of wanting to live.
2013-A little drama on the lawn. One of the fledglings made it to the ground but apparently couldn’t figure out how to get back up (and their nest is way high up in the ash tree). With all the feral cats around here, it’s not a good place for a stranded baby bird. Luckily, Mom came along and with a little encouragement got baby back in the tree.
It is a seventeen-year cicada year. They were deafening in Kingston and on the other side of the river but, although I remember them here last time, there are none now.