Two-Acre Summer

I circumvent my favorite weeds while mowing--one lone mullein along the back border that will rise to four feet before the summer is over; a patch of orange hawkweed by the fire pit; two or three of the giant version of Solomon's seal that arc out from beneath a heavily-lichened oak behind the barn.  Now, I have time for such close observation of the lawn.  The wild chamomile which began to announce my daily arrival home from work in early June through its crushed pineapple scent brushes my tires with new height when my car doesn't move for several days.  You see, school is out for summer.

I inspect the scat in the crook of a silver maple that has split into three broad trunks at breast height, full of seeds and the golden forewings of coleoptera--which, hardened to act as sheaths for the beetle's more membranous hind-wings, are indigestible.  I knock on the bluebird house as if to request entry but really to urge the mother out, who has sprung nearly into my mouth when I have opened the box without warning before.  I check for the rapid breathing of the gray babies.  I wonder if they will fledge or if, like some years, they will die and mold in the nest, perhaps poisoned from insects soaked in Round-up, which the farmer rains down on the fields surrounding my small plot of land.

There is a small part of me that wonders whether I should be away on some adventure, taking advantage of my sudden and prolonged freedom.  Have I traded rows of desks only for the invisible rows on my lawn, which I ride up and down with my loud mower, and the short rows in my garden, along which I crawl on all fours, pulling up plants I might, elsewhere, covet?  Maybe, one day, I will go. 

But this year I think I might take a safari in the lilac.  I say it this way to make it sound like the Sahara or the Amazon or the Orient, for to me it is territory just as uncharted.  All day long I watch the hummingbirds fly back and forth from the lilac to the feeder I have hung by the window and the plants I have hung on the porch.  So I will pull a simple chair into the bush (which is half the size of a garage) and sit and stare, until I lay eyes on that walnut-sized hummingbird nest made of plant down and spider webs that I know--I just know--must be there.