Summer seems to have arrived, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Summer seems to have arrived, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Nor am I in a hurry for heat and humidity. I have about 60% of my lighter clothes out and maybe 75% of my warmer clothes in the storage closet. I wore shorts for the first time in many months one afternoon this week.We are trying to get everything out of the greenhouse this weekend as it has been getting very ovenlike in there, if the rain holds off long enough. We need the rain, so if it prevents some of what we have planned, that’s fine with me. Lilacs in bloom, wood hyacinths [they spread and colonize so we have many of them, some in the woods in uncultivated land], the crab apples just finishing their gorgeous reddish flowers, shadblow, the first giant alliums, sweet woodruff [another plant that spreads wildly], marigolds I started from seeds in the greenhouse, cosmos [also started inside], lingering daffodils and some red and some orange tulips, violets both white and purple. I haven’t found any of my pink violets this year. I wonder if they died out. We have in residence one lone red winged blackbird, a male who doesn’t have a mate. He seems quite handsome so we wonder why nobody chose him. Anyhow, he is at one of the feeders every day. We have many chickadees, of course, nuthatches, robins, cardinals, goldfinches, catbirds, house finches, downy and hairy woodpeckers, red bellied woodpeckers and the usual contingent of mourning doves. The crows are around less lately. They are always welcome. I have gotten back to writing poems this week, three of them, in spite of reading and annotating three mss. for my juried intensive poetry workshop, in spite of everything else I’m doing. We had a disaster with some of the maincrop tomatoes and lost a whole row of them. We’ve been looking for appropriate heirlooms to replace them and have found some mortgage lifters and Cherokee purples. The other two rows are doing fine as are all the paste tomatoes in my raised beds. We’re not sure what happened. I had lunch in Orleans with a dear friend Gigi this week. I don’t like to eat a sizable lunch but often that’s the only way to spend time with women friends. Last night we had dinner at a friend’s house with two other couples and our friend, who was widowed two years ago. We talked about how the 20th century history of Wellfleet is vanishing and how it might be preserved in oral history form before everyone who knows it is dead. Wellfleet has changed so much in the 45 years I’ve lived here that few of the new people who have moved in since have any idea of what kind of place it has been. The local historical society has focused on the 17th through 19th centuries, but the 20th century was quite fascinating here. When cats reach their first birthday, they begin to shape into their adult personalities – not that they cannot continue to change throughout their lives, especially when their companion cats die and are replaced by new kittens. Willow is emerging as a very gentle, affectionate and peace-loving cat. She is playful but does not like to play rough, unlike Mingus and Xena. She is sensuous, a little bit piggy with food and very much a lap cat. She also climbs exceedingly well and is always scaling some new object. She remains the Cashmere Cat with the softest fur imaginable. She is one of those personalities who want everything nice, everybody polite and let’s all be sweet and get along together in harmony. I remain in her eyes her mother. She still occasionally tries to suckle.