Late June-Early July

The past three weeks have been a busy time here, and far too much of it has been spent indoors. Summer in the center of this peninsula can sometimes seem Mediterranean: the dew on the grass cool on your feet in the morning, just enough sun in the afternoon to send you for shade, and evening on the porch cool enough to call for the warm comfort of red wine, not white. But this recent time has seen polar extremes. To wit: on June 24 and 25, our porch thermometer showed 105 and 101 degrees; on June 30, in the evening while Alison and Jenny were sorting through her stuff downstairs, I built a fire in the woodstove to take the chill off the house.

The second and third photographs show some of the placidity of this time around the summer solstice. The deer we worry about all winter while they're driven to eat pine and spruce needles, have fattened well through the spring and dropped their delicate fawns. White is the dominant color on the Daisy Slope, where the white of daisies and yarrow rise above the yellow of hawkweed and mouse ear and the orange of orange hawkweed. (By the way, with my new Newcomb's wildflower guide, I've identified just over 60 flowering plants so far this year.)

Photos 4-6 show a Goshawk that investigated a deceased red squirrel I dropped in front of the trail camera. I was hoping, of course, for a photo of who carried it away, but the camera failed me this time. In the seventh photo you can see how a deer reacts to a thing found dead. There's another "mystery light" in the eighth photograph. I can only imagine that it's someone walking around at 3:30 in the morning wearing a head lamp, but what for? What else could make such a light? We have lightning bugs, but geez! I'm trying to sell the next photo to three companies: the makers of Carhartt overalls, Nikon binoculars, and whoever made my neoprene mucking boots.

On Saturday, June 20, after our guests, four of Jenny's best friends, left, I walked down the Slope and met a foot-long snapping turtle on his way up. He pulled his head in and wouldn't answer any of my questions, so I don't know where he was going. He was leaving behind our perfectly fine marsh, but he must have gotten a whiff of the Mitchell trout pond and decided he was tired of wood frogs and worms. On the same day, down at the edge of the marsh, I watched a movement in the tall grasses and waited until three baby minks moved out onto the mowed trail to peer cautiously about. They emitted a tiny little weasel cry, calling for mom I suppose. Then they turned and re-entered the safer cover of the grasses. A minute later, a fourth sibling emerged at the same place, called, sniffed, then followed the others. The trail camera has captured numerous images of this year's crop of teeny fawns in every antic pose, and it is very clear that the thing they do better than anything else is follow mom.

A pair of Phoebes built their nest over the outside light near our downstairs doors (top photo), and we've enjoyed waiting for their young to hatch and grow. As you can see, the nest is now full to overflowing with Phoebe fledglings. One reason I have for enjoying these birds so much is that Audubon observed a family of Phoebes closely in a cave in the bank of the Perkiomen Creek near his Mill Grove farm in Pennsylvania in 1804 and 1805. This was his first home in America, the first of his amazingly extensive field observations of birds, and the first birds ever banded and then positively identified a year later by the bander. The parents returned to the same cave the next year still bearing the tiny silver threads Audubon tied loosely round their ankles. Naturally, when Audubon began courting his neighbor, Miss Lucy Bakewell, he asked if he could show her the phoebes in his cave. She had no idea what she was getting into, but who ever has?

The striking Virginia Ctenuchid moth ( Don't worry: the "c" is silent because it's a Greek word) emerged in the middle of June and is now quite abundant, and my favorite flower from last year, when none of my books would help me identify it, I now can announce is the Deptford Pink. Only the orange hawkweed rivals it for chromatic flare.

The last photo shows the first attempt at my "amphitheater." David and Shane came up this past weekend, and the three of us, using my new spud bar, purchased for moving big things around, managed, with assistance from some slope and gravity, to move several large stones into place around a conceived small fire-ring where big ideas will not be cramped up as they are in the house.

This afternoon Alison and Jenny drove into the maelstrom of Houston and located Jenny's new apartment. This evening they're shopping for furniture and every imaginable household thing. It's a hundred degrees and humid and the time for adaptation is short. She begins her new teaching duties in two weeks or so. She was here after her return from Shanghai only about that long, but while she was here, we had two weekend parties with lots of food, wine, lies, horse shoes, croquet, and twenty-somethings sleeping everywhere.

Alison will be home on the 8th, and she'll have much catching up to do for her new graduate course in anthropology (as well as her two-year-old conjugal bliss), and I have a book to finish. (Yes, the same book.)