A beautiful sunny day. Yesterday was seventy four degrees. It must be summer because I tweaked by back. I did something simple. Mowed the lawn the day before so my back was a little stiff and then I just twisted while lifting something incredibly light and boom. Now I’m gimped up, walking around like a Zombie groaning and stumbling. Jan and Dot slept outside to get away from me, worried a bit that I was going to start eating brains in the heat of the night. They had a fine time until the sun started coming up and Dot figured it was time to play. I could hear them beneath my window and I looked out and Dot was sitting on Jan’s head tossing the extra pillow up in the air, and I could hear Jan’s muffled cry’s, “Dffot. Dffdot! Gifftoooft offffmee!” Which almost made my back feel all better until I started laughing then I twisted it again and a sprawled out flat again.
I’m sitting up with both doors to my office open and typing and Jan drove into town to go to the post office. She also got a text from Ernie who had been sawing up some yellow cedar logs in his mill and invited Dot to come over and play with his dog in the big chip pile he created. So Jan took Dot to the big yellow cedar chip pile for a kind of bath and frolic. Then she will take dot to the beach for some sandpiper racing. There really is no lack of fun things to do if you are an over active six month old dog.
The path to my office. I’m cultivating the dandelions here.
Just a few dry warm days and things go wild around here. This little foreign anarchists the dandelions have come back with vengeance. The are non-native to this region and as such, I should not welcome them to my yard. My neighbors have new grass and they look at my love of dandelions as somewhat dangerous, but like politics, religion and proper soup making we don’t bring it up. There is just an iciness that comes between us in certain conversations. But here is what I like about dandelions:
They open up in the morning and shut down at night. Like a bakery, and you don’t pay extra.
They always face the sun, turning to watch it. Again absolutely free no training, no feeding. They just do it.
They require so little maintenance it’s frightening. In fact the opposite. You can’t get rid of the little buggers.
They are pretty in their yellow form, and whimsical in their seed form.
You can make wishes on them in the seed form.
You can tell your future girlfriends or boyfriends with their petal form.
See point three…. but they require no watering.
The dandelion is a humble flower, bees like them but you don’t see them in many expensive flower arrangements or snooty mentions on the social pages. re: “Ms, Ruttlesnout’s dress was trimmed in mauve lace, garlic flower, and a dandelion corsage.”
I also dug up some wild Irises from Kruzoff island and transplanted them in our yard and they have never let me down. So too the salmon berries that seem to want to take over our yard every year. When I was a kid, and I first started riding horses in the Cascade range I was amazed that horses loved to eat the flowering tops off of thistles. They were beautiful but they seemed very unappetizing to me. Very pokey and sharp. I couldn’t imagine wanting to eat one, but I swear the big old horses I first started riding would not take my direction at all and would wander off a trail to snarflel down a thistle flower. I was amazed. But if I could raise them in my garden here I would. They were so beautiful. If I was tough enough too to eat them I would do that too. Imagine be able to get so much pleasure from something that pretty and from what also seemed so pesky. “Oh thank you, I think I will. and just snarf it right up. Lovely. The only thing I ever grew that I loved that much was sweet corn and fresh tomatoes, one summer in eastern Washington.
Dot appears to like to eat bees. She runs into the salmon berry canes and gets the honey bees stirred up and then she bounds after them. She will jump into the air and her mouth will come down on top of one and her big lips will pop down on one bee and keep her mouth shut. Then she will roll around on the grass with her mouth closed for a bit then she will open with her mouth and begin eating grass. I’m not sure what she is really doing at this point, but it looks like she is bee hunting again. It seems odd. I never did that in summer. I did pretend that I could feel which way the earth was turning. I could feel it in my body and my head. This used to make my brother Hugh furious. I would spin around until I would fall down. Then I would lay on the lawn and tell him I could tell how the earth was turning. He insisted that I was just dizzy. On just chance, one time I pointed in the correct direction just the direction that the earth was actually spinning. I totally lucked out. I had been spinning around and I was dizzy the right way.. This made my brother so mad. He was very smart my brother. He was going to Yale. He would become a famous Doctor. I was dyslexic. My parents whispered about me. I liked to just spin around on the lawn until I fell down, and then tell people I could feel the earth turning. No wonder people whispered and worried about me. My brother ran into to tattle on me. I don’t know what he was so upset about… I guess that I was an affront to the scientific method. I didn’t care. I just thought it was neat trick.
This was just one of the grudges my brother had against me. I also liked to sing at breakfast time. While I ate my cereal. I think that it was the combination of humming kind of tunelessly and slurping my milk used to send the future doctor through the roof. My mother by this time was kind of through with parenting. Remember I was the youngest of five. She was done with being a good parent. “Oh just leave him alone! He’s not hurting anybody.” Is what I remember her saying to my brother. Both about the cereal singing and about the turning of the earth, my mother was happy as long as I wasn’t making demands on her time. When I asked if I could join the Cub Scouts she told me the Scouts were affiliated with the Nazi party through the neckerchiefs they wore. Even I knew that wasn’t true, but I didn’t fight with her because the truth was the uniform was the only reason I wanted to join. I really didn’t want to do any of that stuff, I had seen my sister do in scouting.
I loved summer when we lived north of Seattle. I remember those months as being idyllic. Stiff jeans and one sweatshirt for weeks at a time, if I remember correctly. I mowed the lawns, and I felt itchy and sunburned most of the time. I read comic books. I slept outside a lot. We had a rope swing that went way out over a ravine. We seemed rich and I’m sure we were. My parents never drove me anywhere, I could go anywhere I could get on my bicycle. I had to be home to feed the dogs by dinner. Maggie, Kattie, and Jigs. Jigs was half lab and half Iris Wolfhound. Jigs reminds me of Dot. Sweet but a rascal. Jigs met a bad end as I remember. He turned out to be a goat killer, and a chicken killer. He ran off and didn’t come back. I don’t think he meant it unkindly. I probably wasn’t feeding him enough.
Sitka only has days of summer. The report is for rain again by mid week. Our driest months are April, May and June, by the end of July it feels like summer is ending here and the end of August the rains are often headed on their way. Though sometimes now you cannot tell. We have had hard hard rains in August but we have also had some warm days. Climate change is throwing us some curveballs which I can’t predict. But still, we have not had long lingering months of summer. These few days in April, May and June, these few days our our time to wax nostalgic about summer. Spring, like the cherry blossoms have come and gone. So, out to the porch with the blow up mattress and the time comes to snuggle with the dog in the cool night air.
The Cherry Tree today. Leafs are here and the blossoms have faded.
Doors open, one bee
flies in a shaft of sunlight
while the black dog naps.
Here is a recording I made of me reading an old essay I wrote for John Leonard in These United States in 2002.
