Every Monarch

I haven't planted much milkweed for the monarchs this year, just two in the spring. There were several volunteers that did well for them as well. It rained almost every day, so the usual summer activity was curtailed.

However, more than a dozen hatched successfully over the course of the summer. Yesterday I saw two courting near the milkweed.

A few minutes ago, something caught my eye as I was uncovering my car. I thought it was a yellow leaf. Then I saw the black veins. The spider was right there, about to deliver the coup de grace. I waded into the passion vine with a stick too short to reach it, went and got a longer stick and waded in again. I pulled the web down and it lodged on a camellia branch. I pulled at the web, both spider and monarch fell into the passion vine, and the monarch freed itself and flew away high.

To the spider I said, you snack on something else. That one's endangered.

Fair winds and following seas to you, Belle

Belle is on her way to South Carolina with her new people. She is going to be a freshwater girl. They arrived almost two hours early. We scrambled to get ready. We pulled her out into the driveway. Chocked the wheels. Trailer check. Centerboard check. Locks and keys gathered. Her new owner is so excited about her, excited as my Dad was when he brought her home.

Dad found her at a nearby TVA lake in Tennessee, so even though she was designed for the Isle of Wight, she is fine with freshwater too. They are keeping the name Belle, which is good because the winds and waters know her already.

When they pulled out the driveway with Belle and rounded the corner, I felt good about it. Her new owners were so excited. Even the dog was excited. They put him in the boat and he looked like he had been in boats all his life.

We sat on the porch at lunch, remembering some moments. Dolphins, turtles, puffing along with no breeze and shallow water over the turtle grass on hot summer days. One time a big bonnet head shark ran in front of the bow as the dolphins like to do. The big storm she got us through safely-- my husband kept a clear head. Fishing from her was awkward with all the sheets and shrouds. One day with little breeze, Bob had the tiller between his knees catching trout after trout. 18 years with Belle.

More deer

This picture was taken Friday morning through a window. Two male deer were browsing their way across the back yard. They seemed to be eating Virginia creeper and grape vine leaves. We had seen one of them before, but now we saw two males at the same time. One of my neighbors said she has seen four deer all at once in her yard-- male, female, and two fawns. My husband thinks these might be two brothers, perhaps two years old, since they are keeping company together.

It has been a challenge to keep them from eating the antique roses this summer. I spray with Liquid Fence every weekend, but the daily rains, sometimes very heavy, have been washing it off. We have had two dry days since I sprayed on Thursday, so the roses have been able to put out some new growth. Years ago, I planted the roses to have some variety of plants. They don't attract butterflies or hummingbirds. The songbirds sometimes eat the rose hips. So I keep growing them and spraying them. But with the number of deer in the neighborhood increasing, the roses are under constant attack. I might not have planted them in the first place if I had known they would just be nibbled down to bare sticks by deer.

Belle

Belle was my father's sailboat. We brought her to Florida when he died and sailed her for 18 years. When I realized we had not sailed her in two years, I felt it was time to let someone else sail take her out on the water. I posted an ad on Boat Trader a week and a half ago. The first call seemed hopeful but he decided she was too small. The second inquiry was mostly concerned with trailering her with a small car. While he was mulling it over, the third call led to a sale over the phone. Early this morning I sent more detailed photos, and by mid-morning I had a down payment and arrangements for a pick up in three weeks. 

Our favorite place for boating, Cedar Keys, is not particularly easy for sailing. The way the prevailing winds, keys, channels, currents, sand bars, and oyster bars are laid out meant that we usually took down the sail and motored back to the dock. Still we had many happy days of sailing with her, and I always thought of my father's dream of being sailed around with his children crewing the boat. It was a reasonable enough dream, except that the physics of sailing had me absolutely stumped and I'm not much of a sailer. So Dad and I only had one sailing adventure together on Belle. My husband is the one who deserves credit for keeping her in repair and understanding how she runs. 

At first we seemed to have all the bad luck in the world. We put a lot of time into new sails, rigging, mast, motor mount... too many things to recount. After a couple of years we realized we had made an egregious error. She had never been properly renamed. So we bought champagne and put her in the water in a lake, at a friend's dock. We loaded her up with friends and christened her properly. After that, the winds and waters knew her again and things went much more smoothly. 

Belle was perfect for turtle spotting at Cedar Keys. My favorite place was up on the bow, wedged on one side of the jib. Dolphins loved to run in front of her if she was going fast enough. She wasn't the best for fishing, with all the rigging and shrouds, but the quiet of a sailboat is like no other quiet. 

One of my most cherished possessions is a pair of wind tells that my husband gave me. I considered keeping them, to help me figure out which way the wind is blowing when conditions are puzzling. Instead I will be sending them along with Belle. If I haven't learned how to read the wind by now on my own, with my father's and husband's guidance, the little flags won't reveal anything I can't calculate with some hard thinking. 

Speaking of butterflies

A neighbor stopped by Sunday evening to ask my husband about all the butterflies in our yard. I called the next day to see if she would like talk about gardening for butterflies. She came by yesterday, we got rained out, and we tried again this morning. Turns out she is also a bird lover and cat lover and is just beginning to think about planting for wildlife. I thought it might be helpful to see how big a footprint the plants will eventually need, which ones spread and take over, and which ones are favorites among butterflies, bees, wasps, hummingbirds, and songbirds. (As long as the wasps leave us alone, I don't mind them. Some of my favorite birds eat wasps.)

Every winter I try to dig out some of the passion vine that is growing too vigorously among my camellias and citrus. When the weather gets really cold and there are no caterpillars, I try to thin out the roots. Every summer I enjoy the swarms of fritillaries and zebra long wings that spring up from its leaves, but it's overwhelming how the vines cover up the bushes.

We also talked about larval food for specific butterflies. It's rewarding to see the caterpillars grow. A gardener has to understand that among the flowers, there will be some plants that are eaten all the way back to the stalks. The more you plant, the more they eat. That's the trade off.

Brand new

Tomorrow is trash day. I was taking the can down to the street when something in the driveway caught my eye. A monarch butterfly. It looked odd. Gradually I realized its wings were still filling out. It must have just hatched out of its chrysalis. So glad not to have stepped on it, or rolled the can over it, I continued down to the street. As I came back up the driveway, trying to remember exactly where it was, in relation to the live oak tree, I saw the monarch fluttering over to a camellia bush, its wings now ready for flight. It was flying confidently, to flowers, over bushes, then back to the cut leaf coneflowers that are now in full bloom. This weekend is an international monarch counting day, so I will see if I can figure out how to post the number I have seen in my yard this weekend. I felt privileged to have them in my yard, whether I see them or not. It is pretty great to see them, though.

Cat, bird, and snake

I was reading the paper while the cats had their morning time outside. Suddenly Daisy leaped into the air at something. She was under the abelia bush, right by the cat door. I thought she was after a butterfly. Then a hummingbird came by and took a long hard look at the abelia bush before deciding against it. That's when I saw the snake. It was another yellow and brown striped rat snake, but smaller this time. It was coiled around a branch and bunched up in distress.

Bob went around and got the snake out of the bush. It gave him a little bite. Mack came to watch. Then Bob succeeded in catching the snake, which was watching both him and the cat. He put it up into a tree where it could easily get away from the cats. Naturally, all three of the cats sniffed the area on the grass where the snake had been. 

We know many creatures travel through our yard and the woods behind the house. A week ago, I heard a fox calling to her kits for almost half an hour before the yard crew arrived next door. I was doubly glad I had kept the cats in. The foxes stayed in the woods that morning, but sometimes Mack goes into the woods. He seems to do it less than he did before his misadventures in March. Of that I am very glad.

Look up!

If I hadn't procrastinated and gone for a walk around the block at high noon today, I would have missed a wonderful sight. I heard them before I saw them-- a high-pitched chittering that seemed to come from the tops of the trees on all sides. Then they flew over me about twenty feet off the ground, over a house near me. Swallow-tailed kites, three of them. They circled back and began to climb higher and higher, still calling for a while. I stopped to watch. Then I looked down for a moment and they were gone.

Look down!

Birders say, "Look up!" It's true we spend most of our time looking down to where our feet are about to go. When I'm mowing the lawn, it's best to look down. A week ago I had just mowed about ten yards when I saw a sudden movement to the right of the mower. It was a brown and yellow striped rat snake, a pretty good-sized one, bunched up in self-defense. I stopped moving and she/he went off to the nearest flower bed. Yesterday, I saw a sudden movement in the grass and it was a large, very fluffy white caterpillar scrambling to climb a blade of grass to safety. I mowed around it and went back later to notice field marks. A Virginia tiger moth caterpillar.

In the looking up department, two days ago I let the cats out around 7am and walked out to enjoy the morning with them on the front walkway. Four pileated woodpeckers were in two pine trees right there by the driveway, clacking and climbing, looking for something to eat. The cats were a little startled, and so were the woodpeckers, and the birds moved on to farther trees.

The juvenile red-shouldered hawk that fledged into our oak tree has become more confident with her flying. For about a week she was mostly laddering in the oak tree next to the garage, trying to figure out how to navigate through the trees. Her parent brought her prey drops. I could tell when those happened because she would stop calling and grow quiet. She stays mainly in the pine trees now, which is where her parents would rather have her. She started working on her hunting skills about three weeks ago, trying to catch doves from the bird feeder. Then she moved on to squirrels, which seem to be easier. She comes into the yard every day, with her parent nearby keeping an eye on her progress.

Corny cherries

My garden has a sense of humor. Two days ago, it cracked a joke.

The humor usually comes in the form of irony. I fill in an armadillo hole one place, she digs a hole somewhere else. I struggle to keep trees healthy and safe, and they drop seeds that sprout in the flowerbeds. I let one poke plant grow for the birds, and the next year I am covered up with poke seedlings. What I saw two days ago was more along the lines of a pun.

I was picking ripe cherry tomatoes off the two vines I planted, one Sun Gold and one Roma red cherry. There, balanced between a part of the Sun Gold vine and the tomato cage, was a ripe cherry from the laurel cherry tree nearby. How it fell and didn't bounce to the ground, I was not there to witness. It perched as if to say, hey, we're all cherries here.

In a few weeks I'll be pulling laurel cherry seedlings from under the cherry tomatoes. Another joke.

Mack helps with the chores

Mack likes to help change the bedsheets. It's playtime. Here he is after we played in the outgoing bedspread. We have a routine. He knows it's okay to hop on when the clean top sheet is going on. Then he helps with the bedspread, which means it goes on over him and we play paw through the bedspread. After a few minutes of that, he comes out on top and nestles on the clean bedspread, looking very pleased with his accomplishment.

He likes to help change the bath towels too. This mainly consists of hopping into the laundry basket and sometimes getting a ride downstairs. However, changing the kitchen linens is not very exciting. They're too small for much mischief.

Again this year the cherry tomatoes are loaded. I actually have enough to share with the deer, but I don't see any evidence that she has been coming around. She goes to the roses and if the rain has washed off the Liquid Fence, she has a nibble. Last year's picture framing wire around the tomato plants kept her off. I didn't bother with it this year. I have the plants growing up through two really large tomato cages, and then around that I have tall spiral stakes with a green plastic coating. The picture framing wire doesn't seem to be necessary. The green stakes are enough. Speaking of tomatoes, I hear thunder so I will pick today's catch. Last night I stewed a dozen in olive oil, salt, and pepper. They were super yummy with Mark Bittman's tiny pancakes and steamed asparagus.

Mack and mouse

I spent all day scoring papers yesterday. Mack came to investigate. The only thing moving was the mouse, se he went after it. This morning he is lying on the desk with his nose three inches from the mouse, purring. He's a very sweet cat. I am keeping the cats in because a storm is coming. We have been hearing thunder all morning. I let them out briefly and there, after months of absence, was the neighbor's cat. He used to come into our driveway and I would give him treats. Then when Bonnie got sick, he stopped coming. That was two months ago. Suddenly here he was again, and Nick got upset. So I brought them all in. Mack is taking it pretty well. He loves to be outside. 

At the beginning of March he disappeared. He got out in the morning and I didn't realize it. He didn't come back the next day. I hung blankets in the yard and called every morning and afternoon at the same time. I made signs and put them on the mailbox. We thought we would never see him again. I found out from a neighbor that he has been going through the woods behind our houses as far as three houses up the hill. How he survived two nights with the predators in the yard, we will never know. Finally on Saturday at lunch he came home through the cat door. 

A week or two later he disappeared in the evening. He came back finally with something wrong with his throat. Since then he has not wandered so far away. We know he is an escape artist because he was "lost" by someone during spring break two years ago. Always come home, Mack.  

Bonnie

If your cat is chewing cardboard and licking the walls inside the house, take her to the vet immediately. I didn't understand these warning signs until they had been going on for weeks. Then one Saturday, my husband said, "Bonnie is licking the concrete on the front porch." I did some research and saw two possible causes-- anemia or kidney problems. I took Bonnie to the doctor the next day. Her blood work came back with some alarming numbers. She was severely anemic and her immunoglobulins were high. The doctor laid out the possible scenarios, which were vague, and plans for further testing.

With all of the cats in our family, we have been very clear with the doctors that we are willing to go so far with testing and treatments. It's not just about money. It's about suffering. So first of all, with Jeff, the yeast tumor in his ear could be removed and he would just have hearing in one ear. His enlarged heart could be treated with medications. It was expensive but reasonable. With Lily, her heart failure could be ameliorated with medications. She had an inhaler for her lungs. With Rosie, we injected subcutaneous fluids and gave her medications. Frida had surgery for uveal ulcers. But when a milky fluid was collecting in her body that could not be explained, we just took X-rays and kept her comfortable. She was eighteen years old. She lived to nineteen.

For Bonnie, we followed the doctor's advice to take her to a specialty clinic for further testing. The most expensive test was first-- an ultrasound to look for tumors. No tumors. More blood work. I took a day off work for this. As always, I explained to the doctor at the outset that we would go so far but no further. No biopsy. No bone marrow scrapes. No chemotherapy. She was unsympathetic, even sarcastic at times. It was a bad day. We tried some medications as a last ditch effort. One more blood test.

The second doctor at the specialty clinic was much more understanding of our wish not to go all out even though Bonnie was only five years old. She said there were no good outcomes for her. "She is not suffering right now. Just weak." She implied (my husband caught this, I didn't) that she could euthanize her for us right away. I decided to take her home, spend the weekend with her, and have our doctor come to the house to put her to sleep on Monday.

Bonnie knew after the first trip to the specialty clinic. She refused to eat pill pockets, which she had always loved in the past. I shredded my fingers trying to get the pills in her. Then I stopped. It was exhausting and stressful for her. She was still enjoying her food, just unable to eat much because she was so weak.

So we spent the weekend snuggling with her. We kept all the cats in so she would not try to disappear to die. I went to work Monday knowing we would put her to sleep as soon as I got home.

Our doctor is gentle and takes her time. The tech had fostered Bonnie and her kittens three years before. We were all in tears. Bonnie was scrappy. Her veins were collapsing because of the anemia and the big needle hurt. They gave her a sedative and waited.

Only three years. The shortest time we have ever had with a cat in our family. She was so different. Bonnie was the only cat we have ever brought into our family who had been a mother. Bonnie's kittens were adopted before we met her. Not only did she get her own three kittens to safety at the clinic, but also, our doctor told us, Bonnie had nursed several kittens who were rescued one at a time. "She saved a lot of little lives, and then you saved hers," the doctor wrote to us later.

Bonnie ran everywhere and caught lizards easily. She had a funny gait, as if her hips were going to get ahead of her. We joked that she looked like a Boston terrier and ran like one too. When she would say "Ek!" to the other cats, it sounded more like a bark than a mew.

Every meal time with Daisy was circle and slap, circle and slap while I prepared the plates. In many ways, Bonnie was such a good girl. She knew not to raid the other cats' plates until I said it was okay. Every morning she greeted me from the bedside table by nuzzling my hand. But she would never stop slapping Daisy at meal time. Daisy wanted to be friends, but Bonnie wanted to be rivals. Daisy's not a door mat so she slapped Bonnie back.

Daisy had seen Frida put to sleep three years ago. She didn't come near until the doctor left. She jumped when she realized Frida was gone. This time, when she saw what was happening, she was very animated. She marked the medical kit and tail-wrapped the table, the doctor, and the tech. She was dancing on Bonnie's grave. No more slapping and being slapped.

In the days to follow, I could tell everyone missed Bonnie. She was playful with the boys. But no one missed the slapping. Daisy could let down her guard a bit. But I took it harder than I thought I would.

Night visitors and subtraction

I have known for a long time that possum and raccoon come to the yard at night. There is a path from the woods and past the compost heap, where it merges with the path through the back yard that I have worn with the wheelbarrow. The possum digs little holes in the path, looking for grubs and worms, which is annoying because the wheelbarrow snags in the holes. Sometimes the night visitors trigger one of the motion sensor spotlights and I can see them moving around. They look around under the bird feeder for seeds and peanuts. They dig for worms because with all the hulls falling on the ground there is plenty for worms to eat. They go to the bird baths for a drink. Sometimes they come around the side of the house by the garage. They dig in the soft wet areas where the air handlers drain. Last weekend, I saw the turkey during the day, and she went to the air handlers too. A couple of nights ago I fell asleep on the couch and went up to bed later than usual. The lights out back had come on, and I could see two shapes moving around the bird baths.

Out in the yard today, I took up three sapling buckthorns, sadly, because they were not in good places. They are not strong until they get quite big. There are buckthorns growing in the woods. It's one of my favorite trees. The birds go crazy over the berries. I also started digging up a large stand of firespike in the front yard. It grows out over the driveway, it blocks the view of the house from the street, it was crowding the purple crinum lilies, and it blooms so late in the season that most of the hummingbirds are gone. I will replace it with pentas, most likely, and some other low growing favorites of the butterflies and hummingbirds. It was easier than I thought it would be to dig up the firespike roots. There are some orange justicia family bushes I will also be subtracting from the yard, because I planted them in places where they get too much sun. I will keep the ones that get enough shade. The hummingbirds really go for them.

The visit and the dream

On the last night of the children's visit, Nick came down when we settled in to watch half a movie after dinner as usual. He circled and nobody except me noticed. After a few minutes of circling, he jumped up into my lap and stayed there snuggling for quite a while. So, real progress for Nick.

Here's the dream from last night. I tell my husband Trump has just attacked Ireland for staying in the EU, because this is disloyal to the British. My husband says, oh, it's in his book. He gets out a book from the 90's called something like Aphorisms for Living. The cover says it's by DONALD TRUMP and two other authors in a smaller font. (It's a collection of other people's writing, sort of like Ivanka's book of favorite inspirational quotations, you know the one where she didn't ask permission to use copyrighted material.) He turns to a page with a quotation about Ireland. It's something out of "A Modest Proposal", to the effect that the Irish can't take care of themselves so the British have to do it for them. That tired old argument. I'm so deeply resentful that it's been a year and that man turned up in a dream, not in person thankfully, but in name and illogic.