Snail mucus… And someone has used some of it. Clearly has something to do with La Kid. As she would put it: Yuckers.

[see post below this one for a pic from yesterday afternoon]

… seems to have tossed some Deep Red Hibiscus seeds into a pot awhile back. Do not remember this, and am not even sure I’m correctly identifying the three feet tall stalk with massively about to bloom flowers all over it.

Once I realized it had big plans for itself, I moved it to a bigger pot and an even sunnier spot on the deck. Plus I’ve put some bracing on the stalk. Now I sit back and watch enormous flowers unfold.

Even so… UD has always preferred the recitative to the aria, the prelude to the fugue. She already knows that this phase – the slow velvety emergence – will be more exciting than the full bloom.

… in UD‘s Bethesda, but at least in her own wooded half acre we do get tree falls, like the big one that startled her last night as she sat in bed with her laptop. It was a still-light summer night, and she looked up when she heard the strange groan she’s come to recognize as limbs and bark suddenly shearing off.

And there it crashed, right there in the middle of her forest, with a house-jolting thud, followed by the rustle of leaves and small branches. Not the whole stable world at once shatteringly kinetic, as in avalanches and earthquakes, but a small stability in an instant unstabled, with all the strangeness and mild alarm (could have fallen on the house) of such moments.

At once UD sprayed herself with insect repellent, grabbed her pruning saw, and got to work clearing her paths of it all. The picture I took shows two large neat woodpecker holes in one of the limbs I rolled aside.

… stands enthralled on a DC rooftop, watching last night’s fireworks.

… gaze from the back of Dave Almy‘s iconic green truck at parade spectactors. First Fourth I can remember when the weather was not just bearable, but actually pleasant. Photo: Bennett Roth.

… to see exactly what UD sees almost every time she looks out the window. It’s always a female ruby throated.

As the photographer writes, bee balm is a “magnet” for hummingbirds.

On its fiftieth anniversary, everyone’s talking about Joni Mitchell’s album, Blue. (Go here.) UD, who listened obsessively to the thing throughout her unhappy freshman year at Goucher College, hasn’t much to add – beyond random unhappy personal things – to all the superannuated hippie nostalgia out there.

As in – her roommate that year, Marian Dillon, was lively, beautiful and came from a wealthy, private school background (UD, remarkably clueless for someone from Bethesda, didn’t know what a private school was until Marian explained it to her). Marian hadn’t brought her horse to college, but Courtney down the hall had (can’t remember her last name, but she was closely related to Philip Roth and looked a lot like him), and UD should have been tipped off from the campus stables and horses and Courtney’s horse scrapbooks that Goucher really wasn’t a good UD fit… But I digress. The sad personal thing is that UD idly searched Marian’s name a few months ago and she died at 52.

That year was also sad because David Kosofsky and I were tumultuously on and off; he’d show up from College Park, we’d thrash around trying to make sense of our hopeless relationship, and then he’d drive back to school. Laurie Fleischman, his true love, was somehow (too long ago to remember) in the background of all of this. And that’s two other sad personal things: Both Laurie and David also died young. “WHAT LIVES ARE IN STORE FOR 2 SUCH AS US!” she wrote him from the Bronx High School of Science. Bizarrely, I ended up with her love letters/sketches/pressed flowers to David.

In one of them, she nastily alluded to wee UD as (yes) “Joni Mitchell.” (David had attended performances I’d given, in high school and synagogue, of Joni Mitchell songs.) For Laurie, Joni Mitchell was short for Not Charlie Parker, Not Hip, Not Jazz, Not… Blues. Joni Mitchell was short for Sylvia Plath – a suburban pipsqueak with the pseudoblues.

UD wonders if, over the years of Mitchell’s artistic development, Laurie felt more generous toward her.

*********************

So picture ol’ UD, years later, tears welling up as she reads Laurie’s letters to David and thinks on the bitter reversal of all that beautiful passionate arrogant youth.

I guess the Blue song for this is The Last Time I Saw Richard.

Insanely invasive and on its way to seven feet tall, this … thing is all over UD‘s garden.

Note that it has begun to put out small daisy-like flowers.

UPDATE: Aska Gardener informs me it’s a weed, and a nasty one. They can’t precisely identify it, but they are familiar with it, and it must be destroyed. So this morning, with the ground still wet from storms, UD lifted, roots and all, every stalk of mystery weed she could find. ANOTHER UPDATE: I think it’s an evil variety of goldenrod.