It has been extremely, almost extravagantly beautiful here since my return from Madrid. Vermont is at its finest -– in my humble, ignorant opinion -– from July through October. I would expand that to include May and June except for the whole blackfly thing, which impacts life in surprisingly concrete ways. The joy of being able to walk outside into ideal weather, in some of the most beautiful country on this planet of ours, free of teeny winged bloodsuckers, is almost beyond my ability to describe. Deep. Transcendent.
The nutbags at the weather service have been claiming there's a real possibility of rain this afternoon, so I dragged myself out at a reasonable morning hour and cut the grass on a section of land I refer to as the UFO Landing Pad -– a flat, circular expanse slightly down the hill from the house, maybe 30 feet out from the northeast corner of the building, overlooking the valley as it stretches away in both directions. During the warm season here, insects spring to life with a concentrated overabundance that is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Unless one doesn't care to have spiders and teensy flying critters finding their relentless way into one's living space, in which case it's annoying or unnerving. But they're everywhere, and the lawn is densely populated with noisemakers of all kinds, flying and hopping in every direction as one disturbs their little lives with human footsteps. Pushing a lawn mower through that produces a scrambling of little critters trying to get out of death's way that reminds me of certain shots from the original Godzilla movies, the ones when the big lizard is taking a stroll through downtown Tokyo and the camera has assumed God-Z's point of view, looking down at the running masses in the street trying wildly to get out of the way of big oversized dinosaur feet. Over ponderous, menacing soundtrack music and Godzilla's overstimulated roaring can be heard the screaming of tiny voices, going, "Augh!! Godzillaaaa!! Godzillaaaaaa!!!" I look down at the crickets, grasshoppers, etc., streaming off in every direction from the advancing Mower of Death, I swear I can just about those same tiny voices crying, "Aiiieeee!!! Godzillaaaaa!!"
And speaking of crickets: if you've read this journal's entries from the past week, you may remember that during my first day or two back, a mysterious silence reigned here, as if the locals were all stunned at my return. Speechless or grieving or expressing pouting disapproval. Far fewer birds than normal spouted off, virtually no insect song rose from the grass. Everything quiet save the occasional breeze in the trees. Normally, at this point in the summer, the insect noise has grown from soft and intermittent to a continuous stream of sound with the conversation of crickets riding atop all of it in an intense, chiming blizzard of back-and-forth chirping. That's what it's usually like. And right now? Not much of anything. Oh, there's been some recovery –- other insects have filled in some of the vacuum, mostly critters that make soft chirring and whirring sounds, a kind of gentle, ongoing late summer noise I like. But no cricket music.
The thing is: I know they're out there. I've seen them during the past week, especially this morning, as I pushed the lawn mower around. They were in there among the hordes fleeing the Blade of Doom, crickets of all sizes, lots of 'em, from teeny buggers to big, fat suckers. So why aren't they making any noise?
Also missing when I got back from Madrid: the robins, a group who had been here in pushy, joyful abundance when I left on July 14th. My little hilltop fiefdom includes 2+ acres of mown lawn, and at any given daylight hour, several robins could be seen hunting amid the short grass. During my first couple of days back: none. Not one. A couple of days ago two showed up, now and then I hear one or another of 'em sounding off. But nothing like before.
This is normal for the end of August. Not for the beginning.
Hmmm.
Meanwhile, yesterday morning I stumbled outside to discover that someone, during the nighttime or early morning hours, had made a meal of most of my tomato plants, sucking down every single green tomato and about half of the branches and foliage. Leaving me eight sad, stalky survivors of a brutal vegetarian feeding frenzy, drooping against their tomato rings in stunned disarray, half their previous size. And -- as the Ronco refrain goes -- that's not all: two of the three sunflowers I'd planted beside the tomato plants also got hoovered down. The only thing that saved the third was that its blossom had already turned brown.
The perpetrator? Could have been a groundhog -- there are two or three of them that maintain summer homes around the house). Could have been deer -- the gluttonous buggers pass through the yard on a fairly regular basis. When I first moved here and planted some young, diminutive maple seedlings in the stretch of ground between the house and the gravel road, each successive morning revealed fewer and fewer leaves remaining due to critter grazing. Until I enclosed the seedlings with chicken wire.
I situated the tomato plants and sunflowers right near the house, just 12 or 15 feet away from the building itself, not far from the kitchen door, a place that sees a lot of human activity. Working on the assumption, I think, that proximity to people would discourage critters from chowing down.
Silly me. Now I know.
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Note: Any further additions to the entry-in-progress of two days ago (3 August) will go into that day's entry until the bugger is complete. And then it'll all remain there, pretending that I wrote the entire thing in one sitting.