This week I had a telephone medical appointment with my Wellfleet doctor. She wants me to go into the health facility for some blood tests but said I could wait a while.  I have a presumably in person appointment in the early winter.  Then Thursday, Woody drove me to Hyannis to Ophthalmic Consultants of Boston, my eye doctors where my glaucoma is measured and treated. 

It’s pretty weird.  A fussy woman at the door questioned me and kept not hearing what I was saying through the mask and getting annoyed at our difficult communication. Nobody else had any problem understanding me through the mask. My eye pressure had risen a bit but not alarmingly yet. Fortunately, the day was summery but not as extremely hot and humid as it’s been; given the relatively comfortable weather, I didn’t mean sitting outside after being checked in. There’s always a huge amount of waiting when I have to go to OCB.

I think maybe because I‘ve been able to see three different women friends on various days, ten feet apart on the sunporch, and because I’ve been out a little, to a nursery, of course into the garden, I’m suddenly writing more and better.  I had missed external stimulation except for the always dreadful news. Woody and I talk a lot every day and evening, but we had been cooped up for three months, seeing only each other, until recently when we expanded our bubble to very careful and safe close friends. It makes quite a difference.  He has also been going to his office on the harbor once or twice a week when the building is almost empty and he need not see anyone.

There has never been a harder year to grow vegetables, but last year was marked by a plague of rabbits – the predators having caught mange and died.  The rabbits ate everything so that we had little left until a friend told me about PLANTSKYDD. Now we have some invisible, probably nocturnal animal that has eaten our broccoli, our Brussels sprouts, our red cabbages. We see its sizable footprints on occasion.  I am hoping it’s not a woodchuck.

The drought wears us down.  We cannot water everything that needs it nor can we water as much as the plants that do get dome water, actually need. We are also suffering a lack of pollinators. I’ve been gardening here since 1971, I have watched the number of butterflies diminish every year.  Now for the first time, we have a scarcity of bees to pollinate our vegetables.   They flower and nothing happens. The cucumbers are dead. The summer squashes are huge and healthy plants, but they flower and tiny squashes form and drop off or wither.

We are trying to have our first dinner guests, two very close friends and us only –out on the sunporch in two groups ten feet apart eating buffet style.  We’re scheduled for tonight.  This morning, I got rhubarb from the main garden. We have some reasonably local strawberries from shopping this morning. As you can guess, I made a strawberry rhubarb pie.  I prefer pies to cakes, myself.

We had trouble with mice building a nest in Woody’s rowing machine. Then the truck began having engine trouble.  I turns out a mouse  had built a nest in his truck’s engine and chewed through a couple of wires. I’m beginning to feel under siege. Yesterday a wood rat was  hanging around outside the main garden waiting for Woody to leave. No fear visible.  One was looking in the kitchen windows while supper was cooking.