Pinguid

The male hummingbird who has overseen and protected the feeder from interlopers all summer came so close to me as I sat on the porch that I could hear the buzz of wingbeats and feel the movement of air. I’ve read that they have the largest brains relative to body size of any bird and think they may recognize me as the creature who makes sure the feeder is clean and the nectar fresh. Likewise, the honeybees who come to get water at our birdbaths seem to know Dennis and me when we freshen the water- they buzz around our heads waiting for us to finish so they can get back to their business. Addendum a few minutes later: the hummingbird buzzed me again and it was not the male hummingbird but a female, probably a young one; the male sat on a twig nearby and fussed, probably chastising the young one not to get so close to me. Oh – there is a downy woodpecker who has figured out that he can drink the sweet nectar from the hummingbird feeder and we see him fairly often too.

I am in love with our garden and all the creatures it hosts. Some examples: On Thursday we noticed 6-8 large – probably 5th instar- monarch caterpillars on the butterfly weed plants I grew from seed in the spring and planted in the sunniest, hottest place in the yard, which is where the sycamore used to shade everything before we took it down. Those caterpillars have since disappeared, and I assumed the wrens who have raised young nearby this summer had stolen them for their young. But no – likely not. I read that the monarchs ingest a form of poison from the milkweed that makes them unpalatable to bird predation. So our hope is that they have moved into their chrysalis stage and that in a week or 10 days we’ll be seeing freshly emerged monarch butterflies. I did see some a week or so ago, 4 at once in the back yard, 3 of whom appeared to be having some sort of mid-air quarrel, and came to find out that male monarchs are very aggressive with each other. Those were likely from the milkweed as well, so if they made it to butterfly-hood perhaps the caterpillars we saw this week will too. We have also seen tiger swallowtails, whose host plant is the ninebark at the back of our rain garden, and black swallowtails, whose host plants are dill and parsley and fennel, also in the garden. There are also loads of bumblebees of different types this year, which makes me very happy because last year we seemed to have a deficit. They especially like the physostegia, which also hosts several varieties of tiny beetles.

The goldfinches come to eat sunflower seeds from the big sunflowers that sprang up without being planted. Everyone visits the zinnias we started from seed this year, because we finally have enough sun and because they are such happy-looking flowers. We never had enough sun when the sycamore was here. This is the first year we have had colorful blooms in the garden in June and July, thanks to the change in light.

We have harvested lots of tomatoes and cucumbers. Dennis has made more than 40 quarts of naturally fermented pickles and we’ve eaten many wonderful fresh tomato salads. My father always had several rows of tomatoes in his garden and one of my favorite things was a tomato fresh off the vine. We may need to start picking them green now, though, and eating fried green tomatoes or letting them ripen inside the house. The squirrels have discovered them – enough said.

Another happy occurrence related to the garden this week. Our neighbor asked if she could bring another neighbor over to see our garden. She came, loved the garden as much as we do and we gave her many plants to take back to her own garden. She returned later to bring us a thank you card and some plants from her garden, and asked if I’d ever been a modern dancer. What!? How did you know? Turns out her husband is a dancer I took classes from almost 30 years ago. When she told him she’d seen our garden and mentioned my name he said “Vivia?” and recalled that perhaps I was the Vivia who was in his classes so long ago. What a lovely coincidence, to connect me to my younger self through the garden. Interesting, those connections that show up over time. Surely no coincidence, we must not let it pass unnoticed.

What else has happened this summer? We had a fierce storm through here just before July 4 weekend that took the power out and it was down for 3 days. I came downstairs as the storm went through and Dennis and I stood at the open back door as we watched the wind push the rain sideways – the winds were 70-80 mph they said. We watched as the top blew out of our neighbor’s sycamore tree and fell on our next-door neighbor’s new fence. Never seen anything like it, I felt like Dorothy in the The Wizard of Oz. Then the following week we came home one evening to find we had no water because crews were repairing a water main break. These experiences made me appreciate, even more than usual, air conditioning and access to running water.