daily update

Up late, up early, cat in, cat out, the cool breeze of the late night comes into the room and stirs things up a bit and finally, there is the light of another beautiful morning.

Ed’s out on the roof taking down the last of the gutter hangers. The tail end of last year’s decision to try life without gutters.

They just collect leaves – he tells me. Well I know that. I used to clean the gutters in my past suburban home, often far too late in the season, when the slime and rot were already half frozen. Still, shouldn’t we be in the business of redirecting water?

But, a year has passed, gutterless, and so down come the hangers and it all gets posted on Craigslist where maybe they’ll sell but probably they will not. We have several items going on Craigslist -- things I would have said had no retail value at all, except every once in a while a call will come and someone will say -- that old screen door...?

I graded today. I know, I promised not to write “I graded today,” but I met my goal and that is quite unusual and so I make this exception. Seven more days and I should be done. Summer starts then.

In the meantime, Lee, our resident farmer, is working her quarter acre in the back.

We have had several conversations with her about what’s happening to the fraction of the field that she has thus far ignored and sometimes we understand each other perfectly and sometimes we understand each other not at all and on this issue it is more the latter. Maybe there is a sister and maybe she is waiting for something, or maybe it is a fragment of land sacrificed to the gods who have decided that there shall be no vegetables grown on it this year.

Our own plantings (and this would include veggies or flowers) are both thriving and being lost to chipmunk lunch. Each morning I go out to see what’s chomped off. Today, it’s the penstemon. Yesterday, it was the phlox. Every day a surprise.

Behind Ed's back I can whisper that The Cat is not guilt free either. He loves to walk across the veggie patch and most recently, he moves nimbly through my most prominent flower bed, then finds a spot between the Daylilies and the Echinacea Purpurea and settles in. Tail sweetly wrapped around the Echinacea tag.

Does he crush some of the plants? Maybe, but at least his mark is less pronounced, less in your face than the bitten off flower heads that are purely the chipmunk’s handicraft.

And still, I cannot complain. They -- the creatures, beasts and birds -- are who they are and if my plant is destroyed today, it will grow back tomorrow or the next year. That’s just the way it is.