Dreaming the World

A day of on-and-off cloud with storms promised for later on. A couple of rare weak tornados touched down locally on the weekend and some of todays storms might turn tornadic as well. Its humid and warm, but not miserable, which is an improvement. Although we are well into August the landscape remains lush, so much so that roads we drive all the time seem unfamiliar at times.

We’ve arrived at mid-August and although days may be unbearable, evenings tend to be lovely. At some point in the evening we join Nori on the screened in deck to listen the crickets and other insects sing. Nori tends to sit on a perch about eyelevel to us as we sit on the bench, all of us looking out into the deepening night. Then it’s time for bed and we all head to the air conditioned bedroom. Even though evenings are much more comfortable than days we have yet to arrive at good air-conditioner free sleeping, but that will come.

We are blessed with proximity to Cape Cod League baseball, a showcase for the very best college players, and a fun evening out for entire communities. The season is pretty much over and players are eager to head home for a few days with friends before returning to school. We only went to one game this summer even as we planned to attend more. The highlight of the evening was a high foul pop-up that dropped three inches from my back after I lost sight of the ball in the twilight, setting up a mad scramble as a pod of grade school boys all tried to get the ball. I was relieved not to have been hit.

This morning I drove a town over for a donut and a few groceries. The village store there has an immense selection of donuts and other breakfast goodies, fresh baked Thursday-Sunday. The earlier one arrives the more options there are. When I arrived a woman was in the process of ordering three dozen…..

Driving through the countryside I noticed a few maples turning red and a number of new houses going up, further fragmenting our already piecemeal landscape. Often these houses are going up on prime farmland, which may benefit the farmer in retirement but further erodes the food chain and wildlife habitat. Organizations and communities can only afford to purchase so much land to put into trust so the rest goes to developers. When farms are saved there are usually young people eager to farm them which benefits all of us.

I imagine those maples were mostly swamp maples, some of them already past rich red and on to dull reddish brown. Swamp maples are often the first trees to turn, sometimes becoming denuded in early September. The trees I saw were right along the road so environmental stressors are likely contributing to their early color.

Our local shorebird populations are already declining as birds begin their slow migration south. A bit later in the season there will likely be a second flourishing of shorebirds as migrants from further north work their way through.

The other night Jennie and I took a picnic to the beach where we watched some of our local osprey chicks preparing to fledge. One chick stood on the very edge of the nest, maybe twenty feet off the ground, then beat its wings and rose straight up about a foot before settling down, only to repeat the performance moments later. By the time the parents returned from fishing it was deep twilight and the chicks soon hunkered down for a much needed night’s rest. As we watched we wondered if the demands of feeding almost grown chicks were forcing the adults to fish later into the evening than usual. Too soon these families will also head south.