THE BEAT GOES ON

A few days ago I made this photo of a small hover fly working a trio of Common Fleabane blooms. Some folks call hover flies "flower flies" or "syrphid flies." You often see them poised around blooms, where they feed on the flower's nectar or pollen. Hover flies are considered beneficial insects, since they're fairly important pollinators, and because the larvae of some species feeds on aphids and thrips, thus protecting plants from such pests' juice-sucking destruction. While the hover fly may resemble a bee in coloration, it is perfectly harmless.

A day or so after I made this image, the fleabane began to wilt. Now the plant is down on the ground—soon to disappear until next spring. In its place will come Daisy Fleabane and Whitetop, and then the asters.

The beat goes on—with insects and flowers, birds and mammals, even incorrigible ol' riverbank-dwelling scribes of maturing vintage. I had my pacemaker's two-week post-implant checkup today, and everything is going fine. I continue to feel better, with each new day bringing an additional degree of improvement. Fact is, I already feel the best I have in years, for which I'm pleased—and thankful—beyond words. My next checkup is in six months. 

So that's the promised update. 

I'll close with a bit of info I found astonishing, even amusing in a flabbergasted "I can't believe anyone would be that crazy!" sort of way. From Helping Your Heart: A Patient's Guide to Understanding Cardiac Pulse Generators, a little booklet which came with the packet I received from the pacemaker's manufacturer at discharged from the hospital. Under "Coming Home After Surgery," a list of dos and don'ts, there's this incredible gem: Do not play with or move the pulse generator under the skin. 

My Lord! Really? People need to be told this? There are really folks who fiddle with the device that's implanted under their hide, wired into their heart, and probably keeping them alive? Are you kidding? So I asked my doctor. Yup, they're out there…and not as uncommon as, say, a Kirtland's Warbler. 

Go figure.

————————                        

MOM'S MEAN ROSE

My mother loved flowers. All flowers—wildflowers, garden flowers, flowers in low-to-the-ground clumps or adorning tall stalks, flowers on vines and shrubs and trees…big, small, bright, demure, there wasn't a bloom of any sort that I ever heard her say she didn't like. And she was especially fond of roses.

One of her favorite roses—perhaps her most favorite—was an old pink rambler of indeterminate name and origin, that grew along the fence in the front yard. This rose only bloomed once, in late spring, but it did so in stunning profusion—hundreds of pale pink blossoms, some as wide across as your hand. The flowers had no scent to speak of, and when they faded and fell, that was it for the year, though the leaves remained a shiny, deep green—the darkest green of any rosebush I know—throughout the summer and most of the fall. Too, the bush was healthy, virtually immune to bugs and diseases that often plagued the other rose varieties in the yard, and a vigorous grower. Almost too vigorous.

Mom loved this rose. However, she also said it was the "meanest" plant she knew.

Yes, that's an odd word. A strange term for characterizing a plant. Plants might be described as pretty, nondescript, fussy, or tolerant…but mean? And Mom meant the word in the sense of vicious, aggressive, ill-tempered. An odd word, indeed. More appropriate, you'd say, for speaking of a junkyard dog. Plants—roses—aren't mean.

Wrong! This rose was mean. That's absolutely the best word. Vicious, aggressive, ill-tempered—like a pink-spotted dragon with distemper. You couldn't walk within a dozen feet of that plant without it drawing your blood! Mowing anywhere close without getting nailed was impossible. Cutting a few flowers was like going into battle—and the rose invariably won. Long sleeves, heavy jeans, gloves, nothing including full body armor afforded any protection. The thorns were huge, innumerable, sharp as daggers, and set at an angle so that when you barely touched one, you immediately drew the cane and its hundreds of other thorns onto your clothing and flesh. 

From the end of one winter to the start of the next, everyone wore the rosebush's wounds on their arms, legs, neck, cheeks, and sometimes elsewhere—a distinctive series of punctures, like lines of stitching from an oversized needle, and either oozing blood or sporting a dark scab, depending on the stage of healing. Scare tissue around our wrists was inevitable.

Still, Mom continued to love this rose; Dad, too, or at least he tolerated it, and was usually the one to give it a good trimming every couple of years, least it ramble into the the neighboring yards…and perhaps up the street, throughout the community, to eventually take over the township. As I said, it was a vigorous grower. 

I write about this rose today for several reasons—first, because it's now in bloom; second, because come Memorial Day every year—which Mom called Decoration Day—we'd gird our bodies as best we could, and brave the onslaught of this meanest rose, snipping blooms as we yelped and wailed, amid much pain and suffering, until we either had the necessary bushel or so of flowers needed for placing on the graves of family members, or else were running too dangerously low on blood to continue. 

Funny the way certain memories stick. Come Memorial Day, I can't help but remember this "meanest" rose and what we regularly faced to gather its blooms. Then there's also the fact I brought cuttings from that rosebush and planted them beside the cottage, when they now thrive—and I plan on taking a few cut flowers from them along when Myladylove and I go to decorate the family graves later today.

In more ways than one, I think Mom and Dad will appreciate the gesture.

———————                                   

WARM WEEKEND MORNING

I got up early this morning, not long after first light. Even then, the grass was dry instead of being covered in its usual glaze of dew, and the temperature was already above the 70˚F mark. According to the weather folks, we'll exceed 90˚F today, tomorrow, and Monday. A mini heat-wave! In May, in Ohio! I don't recall such temperatures coming so early ever before. This is at least a lifetime record if not an actual state historical record.

The river is low and clear. There are geese and their half-grown young feeding and frolicking in the riffle. The pileated woodpeckers are flapping back and forth across the stream and yard, yelping all the way. Roses and peonies, both the same delicate shade of pale pink, are in bloom on opposite sides of the yard.

I wasn't the only early riser. A cock robin was busy hunting for bugs along the gravel walkway—working to help feed the nestlings he and the missus have tucked away back in the cedars. I thought he looked rather handsome standing on this border rock, and made his portrait.

———————

BREAKFAST WITH A WIGGLE

Here's something you don't see every morning—a great blue heron catching, killing, and eating a fairly long snake for breakfast. Well, maybe I ought to say I think the snake was dead before the heron gulped it down—but since there's generally a lot of wiggle remaining in a recently deceased snake, it's only a humanitarian presumption. 

A few whacks on the rocks below the water willows…

Anyway, that's exactly what I saw yesterday morning when I stepped outside with the dog. The big bird was on the weedy gravel bar across from the cottage. This long islet is currently dry and—if you're a heron—knee-deep in water willow. 

As I watched the long-legged bird wade cautiously through the stalks, it suddenly paused, alert, then quickly bent and shot its long beak into the dense vegetation. A moment later it reared up with its writhing prize—what looks to me to be about an 18-inch northern water snake. 

…a quick gulp, and gulp, and gulp again…

Naturally, the snared snake was rather upset by this unexpected turn of events, and began lashing about for all it was worth. In turn, the heron would slam it down onto the bar's stoney deck. Eventually the blows took their toll. The wild lashing became mild wiggling…and without further fuss, the heron simply tossed it back and down—and with one big gulp the snake disappeared, though you could see a lumpy bulge in the back of the heron's throat for a few moments. 

Yeah, that kinda grossed me a bit, too—and I'm fairly ungrossable. Or maybe it was simply because I'd not yet had my morning coffee. 

…and it's time to go looking for a second helping.

Frankly, I'm still not sure whether I feel most sorry for the poor serpent who got ate, or the poor bird who did the eating. I am glad the victim wasn't one of my queen snakes.  

After that, ol' blue simply gave a settling shake of his feathers, and began stalking anew, looking for whatever else he might find to skewer and consume. Who says a canny heron needs water to hunt?

———————

A FONDNESS FOR IRIS

I've always liked irises. Maybe because of Mary Mullins, who lived in the house next door on the street where I grew up.

Mary was a slim, pretty, golden-redhead, perhaps a decade younger than my parents—though still an enigmatic adult. She worked at one of the General Motors factories a few miles away, was a divorcee, drank beer, had a huge gray Persian cat named Fluffy, wore red lipstick and, when the weather was warm, tended to dress in shorts and halter tops like the Hollywood starlets you saw in movie previews at the drive-in. Even in my pre-pubescent oblivion, I thought she was special.

 

She was also friendly, nice to me and my parents, a good neighbor we liked—though many on the street treated Mary with a certain degree of standoffishness.

 

Mary had an obvious fondness for irises. On both side of her driveway, which led from the street, between my parents' house and hers, to a mostly disused garage in back, Mary had planted dozens—probably hundreds!—of iris, with more growing in back of the house, along the walkways, and bordering the side fences.

However, so far as I remember, there were only two flower colors—purple and white…though the whites ranged anywhere from icy to creamy, while purples came in every hue from nearly-blue to violet, orchid, mauve, lavender, and a plum so richly dark that from only a short distance away it appeared black. But none of the yellows, oranges, magentas, or reds of today. 

Whether such color variations were available, or easily affordable, back then, or whether Mary simply preferred a more restricted palette, I can't say. Yet her garden was no less stunning for such limitations.

I have a variety of iris scattered around the yard—many of which I bought on the cheap a year ago at a local nursery sale. Three or four were purchased from a nearby big-box store where I buy groceries. A dozen others were given to me last summer by a neighbor who'd received more than she could handle from another neighbor when she thinned out a patch in her front yard; sort of twice-shared plants. 

So far as I know, the one above is the only example of this particular variation. At least it's the only such bloom I've had this spring. The flower made its debut and too-so exit over the last few days. I believe it's from the nursery close-out's mixed bunch, but have no idea what it's called.

While it's neither purple nor white, I thought it looked lovely in the bright shade of morning light. Wonder what Mary would say?

———————

HONEYSUCKLE

Evening. The temperatures is slowly backing off after reaching an unseasonable 87˚F high, which made today feel more like mid-June. Robins are still poking and prodding the new-turned soil where Myladylove has been transplanting, weeding, and digging new flower beds all day. A cardinal is whistling in the cedars. The river is all in shadows, even to the tops of the highest bankside sycamores—though the slice of sky above is still fairly bright. Time to sit a spell and rest, to watch the light give way as another day fades into night.

The cooling air is redolent with the spicy fragrance of roses and the sweet scent of honeysuckle. I know it's not fashionable to say so—non-native honeysuckles being such a terrible invasive…which they truly are, no question—but there's still a boyhood part of me that never fails to remember the vast tangle of honeysuckle growing in the alley along the far end of the backyard behind my parents' house. 

On early-summer evenings, when the lightening bugs were just beginning to twinkle in the deepest shadows under the big spirea hedge, the cooling air filled the gloaming with the honeysuckle's wonderful perfume. As all semi-countryfied youngsters of that era did, we neighborhood kids often stood around the dense patch, plucking off yellow honeysuckle blooms, after which we pulled out the flower's center stem and licked off the sweet drop of nectar which formed at the bloom-trumpet's base. 

 

Some of us, having remained a good bit childish, still do that—and the tiny drop of nectar tastes just as honey-sweet. 

Now, too, all these decades later, all it takes is a whiff…and I'm transported back to that yard and alley. To a time when life was simple, love was all around, and twilight's darkness held only the most benevolent magic. 

——————— 

  

BEAUTIFUL BUG

A few mornings ago I stepped outside and ambled around to the narrow streamside deck which runs parallel to the river, across what we consider the front of the cottage. The view overlooks the pool below the big riffle. From this vantage point above water's surface, I can often spot a smallmouth bass—or more likely, one of the several resident carp—feeding in the shallows along the rocky edge. 

However, it wasn't a fish in the water below that caught my eye, but a bunch of insects clinging to the limestone blocks of the cottage's exterior wall. Mayflies, large ones, at least a hundred or more. A sight which immediately warmed this old trout bum's soon-to-be-accelerated heart—since we incorrigible fly fishermen, who delight in angling for trout, hold the mayfly second in importance and veneration only to the fish themselves.

Mayflies often emerge from the pool, generally hatching at twilight or well into the night. They're favorite treats of swallows and bats and cedar waxwings—but also scarfed up by bass and minnows, catfish, frogs, queen snakes, crayfish, and everything else which creeps, hops, flutters, slithers, swims, or wings near, in, or above the river.

In spite of their looks—which I deem beautiful, though you, lacking my bias, might call something else—winged mayflies neither feed nor bite, can't, in fact, and are perfectly harmless. While my mayfly identification skills are a bit rusty, considering the slow current, warm water, and partially mucky-bottom makeup of the pool, and the insect's almost two inch length—not counting the trio of extending tails, or cerci—I suspect it's a species of Hexagenia. 

Incidentally, I made the mayfly's portrait on my birthday, the day before having pacemaker surgery. As a fellow who pays attention to such natural signs, and because the mayfly just might be my favorite insect, I took their mass appearance on my cottage wall (and the nearby grapevine where I found my photo's subject) as a favorable portent. 

Hey, I'm charmed by mayflies. And at that point I figured a bit of bolstering-up from a bunch of pretty bugs couldn't hurt. Moreover, they've proven to be wonderfully right.

———————