amazon_syren

Despite everything, this summer is truly a glorious one.

The last three summers have been drought and wildfire smoke, and before that the heat dome. 2020 I spent in a state of basically complete panic that was probably a combination of PDA and work from home interacting, along with the ambient covid panic. I can't remember 2019's summer offhand but I think I changed jobs at that time; 2018 was a wildfire evacuation. I moved into this house in 2017 at the end of summer and that was the last summer like this, with birds and the smell of clover everywhere. Threshold loved me as much then as it does now, part of my body, a fully enveloping love like finally having real skin or gravity.

This year I've only closed the windows for wildfire smoke a couple days. We've had actual rain, the kind of rain patters I remember from before the drought: little wandering thunderstorms bringing cloudbursts and sometimes thunder as they pirouette across the landscape. There's no heat dome; outside it drops to about 10C at night and when I wake up the house is cool; during the day the sun can be a little hot between rainstorms but long cool mornings and the endless stretch of near-solstice evening give lots of time for moving around.

There are more bugs than I've ever seen and my body feeds noseeums and blackflies as well as mosquitoes when I go out in the evening. I leave the fan running in the bedroom, facing out the window, and a window on the north side of the house open downstairs; it pulls the cool air in but also disrupts the mosquitoes and any who get into the house can't fly against the air current. I picked that trick up from an Ologies bug episode, where the entomologist said the best way to keep mosquitoes off a patio was to put a fan at ankle level. They're bad fliers, he said, and like to be low, so they can't fight the air current enough to bite. I love that kind of elegant solution. When I came in from the garden two days ago in the evening my face was covered in blood, half from swatted mosquitoes and half from blackfly bites.

The garden rolls out like a carpet and then fills in like details on an oil painting. I'm putting in paths and trees and trellises, a little at a time, and yesterday I picked up a bunch of perennial flowers and they're waiting in the wheelbarrow to go up and in. I've put in a kolomikta kiwi trellis. I've put in a strawberry bed with six kinds of strawberries. I've put in baby lindens and silver maples and elms and ash and oak and hazel. In one tomato and pepper bed the hazel, cherries, and haskap are there, no bigger than the other little pepper plants and spaced in between them to line a path that does not yet exist, to a spot that is still weeds but will later be a portal.

I have somehow become a person with elderly animals -- not elderly in the way they act, but at ten years old they start to get yearly bloodwork at their vet visit to make sure everything's ok. Whiskey, Hazard, and Siri fall into that category and today is Avallu's birthday; he's 9. Yesterday Whiskey followed me out to the garden and followed me as I wheelbarrowed woodchips from down here to up in the back garden a couple times, then got the zoomies and ran along the path very fast, bounced off the wheelbarrow I was pushing, and kept going. He does not feel elderly.

Anything could happen during the rest of the summer. It's windier than it has been, with tornadoes surprisingly nearby, and the wind strips moisture quickly. We're only saved by the little wandering rainstorms that come regularly. There is a lot of fire elsewhere and strange heat anomalies and floods. Politically we've lost the idea of human life as important and human well-being and rights are so far out of functional equations as to be laughable. There are many wars, even if we don't call them that anymore, and no one with resources is interested in holding back the tide of disease. Systems infrastructure frays and I suspect one day we will wish we had our current access the things that right now we think of as irritating because they are becoming inconvenient: border access, medical systems, air travel, relatively free telecommunications, year round fresh foods, so many things.

This won't be the last glorious summer like this but it might be mine. Even if it isn't I draw a line here: I love being alive, I love inhabiting my life, I very very very much want to know what happens next, but this summer would be enough.

Cool wind and the scent of overnight rain through the window. Warm covers and a cat sleeping on the bed while others wait for breakfast. Thai black rice, coconut milk, and sugar in the rice cooker with apricots waiting. Aspens rustling outside silkily. A pile of woodchips waiting for their wheelbarrow, steaming slightly as they compost. Wiggly dogs and the sound of roosters in the distance and beyond that robins and sparrows. Nearly clean sheets and parsley, mint, and tomatoes from the garden waiting to be turned into tabouli downstairs. Reading again! by audiobook, the closest I can ever have to revisiting my childhood home. A nephew? Even a few people in the world who really want me alive.

It's very good to be here.

Solstice is definitely over. I'd been trying to be outside across sunset and there's no longer a sense that the day will go on forever. Even if by just a coupe minutes it's getting dark earlier and earlier.

It's still light hours before I wake up. Though, this morning I was awoken by a rooster on the front porch (not supposed to be there) and now a road crew. I'm never gonna complain about someone fixing my road, especially since it's already 9am, but with all the windows open to catch the breeze it's very noticable.

I've had a fun fact for a long time -- birds don't have capsicum/hot pepper receptors, so hot peppers aren't hot to them. I've known it in the context of coevolutionary development where the pepper fruits have evolved to allow birds to eat them and carry the seeds away when they're ripe, but protect themselves from anyone else (until humans and agriculture etc). Well, in practice this means if a chicken gets into the greenhouse she'll eat all the peppers off the pepper plants. Even the really hot peppers.

The greenhouse, which used to be the wood tent, is super full-- more full than it can accommodate for the full season. My plan is to exclude the animals from one of the other greenhouses and move things there. This is the point Josh asks, which one? Fair question. The goosehouse greenhouse will hold heat longer in the year and needs a good clean out for two years of deep litter anyhow, so it's probably the best. In the long run it would be nice to have all my greenhouses through the summer.

Naming is also a bit of an issue for these things. The winter pig field is no longer a pig field, and so calling it "the winter field" is a bit weird because, well, in winter everything is just snow. The pigs go into the goosehouse greenhouse in the winter. The upper field is upper, for sure, but the back field is upper-- it's just back and upper. I guess the fields could be named winter, spring, and summer: that accords with their time of planting really. But the green houseshave the same issue: the wood tent is now the greenhouse closest to the house, the goose house greenhouse is more the pig greenhouse, and the garden greenhouse, well, technically they're all gardens, right? I'm very happy to have names evolve because I know what I mean, but describing what's going on to Josh is a bit harder.

Maybe someday the names will settle and I'll paint signs for everything.

I went on an (informal) garden tour at a friend's garden and it's a truly lovely place, but I noticed a distinct lack of labelling. I always want to know what things are -- she has a lot of ornamentals, and also varieties are interesting to me and they're harder to sort than just what species it is by just looking. I think I was spoilt by working at botanical gardens for so long. The task of making ceramic tags for all my plants is enormous but I have been picking away at it and will continue to, replacing my popsicle sticks and sharpie. I don't like unlabelled plants, though labelling is very hard to maintain. This is maybe only the second year my tomatoes have stayed well-labeled so late.

It's been hot and I'm definitely running myself down, so an hour or two in the evening is the most real gardening I get to do. I wander around in the mornings but it mostly feels too sticky and I feel too exhausted and slow. Even so, yesterday I weeded the shaded haskap patch, next to the goose greenhouse, from Canada thistle. It has a cardboard and then deep chip mulch so it's a very easy weed, though I'm not getting all the roots the thistles do need to come quite a ways to get back into the light. And I got them before they bloomed.

I also got most of the hardy kiwis planted, even the ones that got eaten off by the (chicken/cats?). They line one of the pathways in the upper field, and will seperate the ploughing area from the strawberries. Hopefully I'll plant the strawberries today. I have six kinds: kent, seascape, honeyoye, ft laramie, flamingo, and natural white. I'd like to keep them all seperate and labelled, though apparently the white ones want to go in close to red ones for pollination. We;ll see what I can do. Also up there from earlier this spring is my mammoth raspberries and some apples.

The couple days before that I got in the shade garden, pulmonaria and alchemilla and hostas, which I believe I'd mentioned but couldn't remember pulmonaria's name. It's the plant I learned the doctrine of signatures on, though, so it'll always be so distinctive to me.

Speaking of which, there's a plant growing from seed near the tap on the north side of the house. I've been looking at it when I use the tap, trying to figure it out. At first maybe it was dandelion? But no, it was developing that grainy, slightly silvery texture and distinctive shape of the chard/beet/sorrel/dock family. Maybe it was sorrel? It would be a great place for sorrel to grow but how would the seed have got there? Could it be dock? How would dock seeds get there? If it was I'd been to pull them pretty quick...

...then I realized they were the rhubarb seeds I'd sprinkled there last summer coming up. As they develop some are getting redder stems and some greener. I'm very pleased. I have pallets along the side of the house, flat on the ground, to stop the ducks digging up my foundation when it rains. The rhubarb is under one pallet so I'm hoping that'll keep it safe from maurauding birds until its bigger.

The birds are supposed to all be away from the house but the muscovies fly over the fence and the chickens sometimes ignore it. Plan is to create a new enclosed chicken coop since the previous one that was here when I got here is super sagging.

Yesterday was close loud thunder and heavy rain in the evening. I went out to pick some feral gai lan and was soaked. These periodic deep soaking rains are lovely, it's been a long time since we've had them, and it's absolutely a perfect time for me to be laying down paths of woodchips on my very sensitive clay soil.

The corn is growing well. I have a lot of mulching and weeding to do and still some planting. My solstice break is over but I've more or less used it to reshape my habits and spend more outside time and less online time. I'll try to hold onto that until equinox, when I'll maybe try and do it all again.

Now if you'll excuse me, the cat has discovered that if my window is open he can sit on the front deck and meow to get my attention, and apparently I'm letting it work.

Yesterday was outside a lot. I went out in the morning and pulled wheelbarrowsfull of thistles and finished planting my shade garden (hostas! alchemilla! er, the what's-it-called with little purple or pink flowers that under the doctrine of signatures treats lungs and goes in a shady place and has silver spots on the leaves!). Then a deep nap, sunscreen, and more outside play. I even managed to get out for a third time as the sun was setting and stood in the centre of my circle where the elm is growing, hissing and muttering to the setting sun until I had its location. All the cats accompanied me except Whiskey.

I read an entire audiobook yesterday: Mysterious Affair At Styles, an old friend, as are all poirot and marple stories. I hadn't realized just how much of a difference it makes being able to access that familiar-- you know, from my preteens to early twenties I spent much much more time with books than people. Agatha Christie's gently satirical, aware humour is a parent's voice to me, and I hadn't been able to read in flow state since roughly 2016. It brings a piece of myself back to me. So strange that I'd always had difficulty understanding and interpreting verbal language as compared to written, and now my mind is slowed so much and whatever it is that broke in my mind was so pervasive that listening is easier than reading.

There are so many things in my life that are, not unpredictable, but the complete opposite of what would have been believed about me in the beginning. Yet here I am, more myself than ever. Especially more now that I can visit my old book-friends. I'm still listening only to fiction I'd read at least a dozen times before or science fact where I have a framework pre-existing to hang the info on, and I rewind and reread freqently. I'm curious about reading unfamiliar fiction. I'll learn about that in the fullness of time.

In the meantime I can;t access all my old book friends since they're not all audiobooked, but I haven't run to the end of what I can access yet. I do miss specific voices and people, but I do have some. So.

I made a lovely supper last night, put on clean sheets, and went to sleep after midnight, after the sunset.

This morning I woke at 6am with wildfire smoke coming in the window with the light. I got up, closed everything up, turned on the filters, and went back to sleep. I'm very glad the air was clear yesterday but I very much want to plant oaks today. Theoretically we're provided with a smoke forecast so I could try to plan my day around less smoke.

The tomatoes want trellising. The blackcurrants want in the ground. Things want mulch and more weeding. Eggplants need into their final pots in the greenhouse. Things will grow, ripen, and then fade and die. The seasons keep turning. I'm within them. It's good.