Promises, Promises

 

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My previous blog was full of excuses of why I hadn’t written lately. I believe it ended with a promise to do better. About that, it seems I am simply having too much time-consuming fun to actually document any of it. 

I hustled out of Texas at the end of May with the floodwaters at my back. I made my way to the cooler, drier, less humid (at the time) North.  Now it is mid-July and I have spent glorious weeks in northern Maine, hiking to mountain vistas with the family, playing at lakes with the grandchildren, kayaking out among the masses of arrow arum to catch whirligig beetles with my grandsons. 

By night the fireflies came out in masses around my daughters house, imitating fairies in such a convincing way.  I haven’t been around them in years and you just feel your age slip away.  In my mind, I am once again with Skippy jar in hand to make them my own little night light for awhile before I let them go. What simple but satisfying delights the outdoor world is replete with!  The glory of God is all around me and I simply can’t be thankful enough that any of this is happening. Now, where to begin documenting it?

I arrived on the Cape in June, the month I always said I would choose if I had only one month to live here.  Kids are still in school so the tourists haven’t come yet, however the horseshoe crabs are arriving by the hundreds to mate in the shallow salt creeks with the first full moon.  And yes, I know, the invasive, so I should hate it, but powerful-enough-to perfume-the-whole-peninsula, multi-flora rose is blooming EVERYWHERE! In the fields, by the ponds, climbing the trees as vines, making the woods look like a wedding bower.  I could smell the roses the moment I crossed the canal and it is only in June that that is true.

Everyone talks about the tang of salt air, and I think they maybe mean the tang of iodine from the seaweed drying on the high tide wrack.  Not every beach has that but there is an undeniable scent that tells you its summer, your home and no Yankee Candle has ever captured it completely.

All in all I was on the Cape seeing different friends, three separate times.  With any luck I might make it back one more time when I finally leave for home after Iceland.  And the flora and fauna will have altered again.  The marsh grass which takes till mid-June to even think about getting green (you would be slow to grow too if someone was dousing you with 50 degree water twice a day!) is now (In July) so green it is almost painful but by August will already be giving itself over to some subtle autumn hues, gold and rust start to mix with the green by mid-August.  I suppose I should be gone by then!

Well, this ended up being mostly about the Cape. Let us deal with Maine and my routine there in a subsequent blog and Rhode Island and Tuck and I getting in a walk along the marsh each morning from 5:30-6:30. 

He and I witness the morning bird commute and we have seen the osprey’s grow from two little heads barely over the rim of the nest to practically adult sized but, still begging, birds.  Those tales will wait for later.  Right now I need to pack for I leave for West Point tomorrow and Iceland on Saturday! What a gloriously spoiled person I am, but I am also one overwhelmingly grateful spoiled person! I hope your summer is laying down some treasured moments to call on later when winter is upon you.  Literally and metaphorically.

 

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When a Blogger Doesn’t Blog

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When a blogger doesn’t blog, there usually is a reason.  Because I am a person who loves to wallow around in guilt, I feel I need to explain this disappearance before I can return to writing again.  It’s just the way I am wired.  So what are my excuses?

Several reasons jump to mind.  Feb-April is our busy spring teaching season at the nature center so free time gets scarce.  Add that to the fact that it was the wettest spring I have seen in TX so far; floods of biblical proportion, which led to the weediest season I have yet to experience and the limited free time became even more limited. 

Each day would see me coming back from 4 hours showing students the clever adaptations some plants possess whose sticky seeds can hitch a ride on you or any animal that passes by and thereby get away from the sun-hogging parents.  Well, its one thing to teach about it but then to come home and see endless amounts of said plant that needed to be pulled out before they turn my dogs life into misery, is quite another.  I felt like all I did was teach in the mornings and weed and sweat in the afternoons. 

I have had a benevolent policy with the plants in my yard these 5 years. I do not bow down to the god of green grass so I am happy to let the wild flowers occupy a full half of the yard where they do so well in the scrabbly caliche soil that it is amazing.  That half blooms with Black foot daisy and Zexmenia and all manner of fleabanes and yellow composites without any help or attention from me. 

However, the other half is the work intensive half, where fruit trees planted by the previous owner, require drip irrigation that clogs up within minutes of being unclogged, the result of an overabundance of limestone dissolved in the water.  The “lawn” is almost 90% burr clover, the burr that takes all the joy out of it being clover.   

The other 10% sports Malta thistle, which has a vengeful burr, that hurts long after it is removed.  Then there is the “Velcro” plant which again may be entertaining to show kids how it clings to you like Velcro as you pass by, but it also clings to your garden gloves, your shirt, your pants, to every part of you as you tangle with the yards and yards of it which on the one hand is easy to remove and on the other makes you half mad by growing back seemingly overnight and you get to do the whole exercise all over again.

March, April and May I weeded so much that my poor little fingers were always in a state of cramping or “trigger” fingering.   No one wants to hear a grumbly blog and by then it was already getting hot and humid so kind thoughts towards Texas weren’t exactly filling my soul. 

April is the grand finale for Sunday school and I like to end with each class dong a signing praise song, which we did.  It went well, as it so often does, but my little weeded-to-death-fingers couldn’t quite make the appropriate signs.  As it is actually always a hearing audience that sees it, no one was the wiser.

Then in May it was time for me to flee the heat and answer the call of any daughter in the North to help out in any way they needed. 

“Yes, I would come and watch Willow” while my daughter who teaches at West Point had some overnight maneuvers.  “ Of course I would love to come to splash about in lakes and hike mountains with my much missed grandchildren in Maine, and yikes! the wedding of my youngest is fast approaching, so better see how things are going there. 

On top of that, which already had me absent from Texas for a little over a month, now a trip to Iceland is in the offing, spurred on by my globe- trotting middle daughter who has two weeks leave coming up at the end of July.  We will fly from NY so, why drive back to Texas to just fly back here for the flight to Iceland on July 24^th?  Better to just stay!

Oh Yippee! Oh answered prayer! Oh the “Glory of God all around me” that I recognize so clearly in marsh, ocean, forest, pond and lakes.  NOW I haven’t been blogging because I am just having too much fun!  That being said, I have every intention to fit it back into my schedule and start sharing the delirious joy I feel at being back among friends, not just of the human kind, but of the plant and animal kind too.  Dear old chipmunks, and look at that partridge berry along the trail, I know you, and mosses and ferns and lichens. I have missed you all!     

So now, I have every good intention to write anew.  However, this explanation had to happen first; it’s just the way I am, like cleaning the dishes before you start a new recipe.  I am cleaning out the old excuses for my paltry performance in the past before I attempt to write anew of the delights of the present.  Let’s watch and see how well I stick to that.