And suddenly it's summer. Just like that. After the wettest May on record, featuring long stretches of gray, cold days -- occasionally cold enough to warrant cranking up the stove - warm weather moved in two days ago, in perfect sync with the unofficial beginning of the lower-48 summer season. Warm enough to take local greenery over the threshold into vernal lushness, lilac bushes heavy with clusters of fragrant blossoms, dandelions painting green fields with cheerful yellow (before switching to the ugly white that signals the procreative mechanism running hyper-aggressively rampant). Critters are abruptly everywhere, the air on a day like today alive with insect life, swirling about on warm breezes like golden, sunlit snowflakes. (Except for the blackflies, who have been around since the end of April, but are now, with the sudden leap to summery conditions, seeking blood with a ferociousness that indicates unsated appetite.) This morning when the fog began to clear, spiderwebs that have appeared in trees and bushes in unbelievable profusion these last couple of days shone like jewels, the dew-drops on their strands alight with morning sunlight.
The entire crew of songbirds are on board, the hummingbirds who showed up a couple of days back completing the roster. They sing like their lives depend on it, as crickets have begun to make quiet music and the countryside is awash in a thousand shades of green. All of it coming together on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend with a timing that almost seems Hollywoodesque.
Cars with out-of-state plates cruise local highways, their occupants at times looking like they're not exactly sure where they are. Back roads into Montpelier, usually sparsely driven, were alive with traffic yesterday in a way I'd never seen before. Many of the vehicles stopping in Adamant for the annual Blackfly Festival.
Refreshment stand, the Adamant Blackfly Festival
Adamant: a crossroads, one of Calais' (a town without a town center) five teeny clusters of what passes for population density around here. Home to the Adamant music school and the Adamant Co-op/general store, ground zero for the happening. Perennials for sale covering tables along a driveway, an open house in progress in the art studio over the general store, cookies and cakes selling at what passes for a brisk pace in this part of the world (meaning low-key, relaxed -- relaxed enough to border on narcoleptic), two or three musicians cranking out friendly, discrete classical music within the screens of the co-op's new side deck. Almost absurdly good-natured and enjoyable, all of it.
And then today, morning fog gradually giving way to, well, Vermont summertime. Ideal. Spectacular. The kind of display that written descriptions can't even begin to put across. The kind of conditions that soothe jangled nerves, make inner peace difficult to avoid.
Outside, birds now sing evening songs. Late-day shadows extend across the grass, the sun eases slowly down behind the trees. Time to smear on bug goo, mow a bit of lawn, stick some tomato plants in the ground.
España, te echo de menos.
rws 6:17 PM [+]
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