The purple flowers have just begun to emerge on the buddleja by my office window, and already – this moment – a hummingbird is checking it out.

Looks like this.

Intense green. Hard, determined black eyes. A long thin beak deep in the flower.

The impossible white flutter of madly beating wings.

Google Map UD‘s house and you don’t see a house. All you see are trees. Zoom in as much as you like. No house. Trees. Somewhere under that canopy is a little brown house, but the trees swallowed it up.

There are a couple of reasons why UD‘s house is over-forested, why it’s more like a country than a city house, even though it’s in the city.

Yes, UD‘s part of Maryland is urban, and getting more so by the minute. Development around the green island of Garrett Park – the town where UD lives – is rampant.

Which makes it all the more surreal to UD that her life in the little brown house is powerfully dominated by the natural world. Have all the animal and plant species displaced by development moved to Rokeby Avenue?

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

Garrett Park itself has long been an arboretum, with immense trees everywhere. And the town’s always planting more.

UD‘s neighbors and old friends the Pratts own a strip of woods next to UD‘s house. From these woods each August UD harvests giant puffball mushrooms. The same woods hold the graciously rotting branches of immense trees that have, over many years, fallen during wind storms.

Farther up the slope of UD‘s half-acre, the Pratt woods hold large families of deer. One of the families just produced two fawns whose spotted bounciness UD grudgingly admits (she hates deer) is adorable.

Continuing along to the edge of these woods at the top of UD‘s property, we come to another reason her house has disappeared under trees: the railroad. CSX owns the land immediately adjacent to its tracks, which means yet more forest.

One summer we came back from a stay at our little house near Cooperstown and found a dead deer at the foot of our back deck. The smell was outrageous. The guy who took it away said it was probably hit by a train and then staggered down to our house.

Hang a left back toward UD‘s property and we find, under centuries of wild grape, a fox den. The fox feast on the rabbits all over UD‘s lawns. From a tree back there, at night, horned owls swoop down on baby squirrels.

This year, for the first time, I’m seeing gophers.

The most exotic thing I’ve ever seen on my land is a mink.

You say mink need water sources? Another reason UD lives with so much wildlife is that her house lies near Rock Creek.

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

UD is under surveillance by a number of these animals, in particular the fox and deer. They are always watching from the edges of the woods.

UD used to see a lot of racoons and opossums, but she doesn’t anymore. I’m sure they’re out there.

Box turtles sunbathe in the vinca.

Elphaba, a toad, took up residence on UD‘s front stoop one season, and that was wonderful. Magical. You’d flip on the light at night and she’d be gulping down bugs.

Last May I stepped on a big garter snake. Now when I enter thickets to cut trailing whatevers, I scan the ground.

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

Even as I blog, Adam from The Beekeepers is shoveling up a huge yellow jacket nest next to my house. I’ve been aware of it for years, but everyone left everyone alone until yesterday, when I moved the lawnmower over the mound. Out they came, stinging my ankles pretty badly.

I unplugged the mower, shook off the yellow jackets (luckily I was wearing gloves), ran into the house, bathed my ankles in soap and hot water, placed ice cubes wrapped in cloth around my ankles, took a Benadryl and a Tylenol, and tried to calm down.

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

Wow. I didn’t even get to the birds. Last week I found two dead, not-out-of-the-nest babies – one at the end of my driveway, the other on the front lawn.

What we’ve mainly got are robins, cardinals, mourning doves, cat birds, grackles, wrens, and blue jays. I don’t see them often, but I hear wood thrushes every night and every morning – a gorgeous sound.

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

Adam and I chat at my front door. The afternoon is sunny, with mild wind and low humidity.

He couldn’t find the nest. He put down a white powder which will kill most of the wasps, and he’s coming back on Friday to see how things are. Maybe he’ll find the nest by then. Even if he doesn’t, he guarantees that they won’t come back.

But for the next few days “you have quite a few angry wasps out there, flying around wondering where their home went. They’re going to be looking for someone to blame. I’d stay away from that area, or use caution.”

If you’re finally in the mood, here are UD‘s recent Bloomsday posts.

She and Mr UD are packing up to go back to Washington for UD‘s Bloomsday gigs at the Irish Embassy and the Cosmos Club.

UD‘s summer begins; ‘thesdan days are hot, with evening thunderstorms. Here’s this moment’s weather report:

Flash flooding is occurring or is imminent in your area. Immediately go to higher ground if quickly rising water is about to impact your location. If you are in a vehicle, drive away from flooded areas. If on foot, do not attempt to walk through flood waters.

Rumble rumble rumble. Big time thunder.

At the end of a long, busy day, UD‘s been at the baby grand (backdrop for my Faculty Project lectures), playing Little Prelude BWV 938 in E minor. You know the one! Mr UD was on the couch reading and, as almost always happens when I play Bach, he’s now out like a light.

Only a few spotlights are on in our house; and despite Garrett Park having installed tons of forest green old-timey street lamps, things out there are very dark. UD‘s town is a well-established arboretum, with enormous trees everywhere. Not much light, not much sky.

But UD leaves for the beach soon (blogging of course continues apace), where for a change she’ll get nothing but sky and water and a bit of boardwalk. She’s got a date there with the supermoon (June 4) and the transit of Venus (June 5). Later in the summer, at her little house in upstate New York, she’ll lean back in butterfly chairs at night looking for perseids.

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

UD‘s neighbor Tamara
was over yesterday afternoon
to take UD’s photo.

The Chronicle of Higher Education
interviewed her about her MOOC,
and wants to run a picture
with the article.

Here it is.

… to follow UD‘s career as a reporter for the Garrett Park Bugle, here’s her latest.

During one of ‘thesda’s bad snow storms a couple of years ago, Les UDs moved into a nearby hotel (no power at home) and took meals mainly at Panera (UD wanted to do room service, but Mr UD considers room service decadent). Thus UD discovered the phenomenon of café squatters, people who conduct their work day at the local coffee shop, “effectively setting up their entire office at a table: laying out their laptop, smartphone, iPad and bag, ordering a large skinny latte and then staying there for the afternoon.” As the commenter in my headline notes, it’s pretty obnoxious. And try making money when your bistro is full of people spending three dollars and then chatting on the phone with their clients for the rest of the day.

A new place, Filter, has opened in Foggy Bottom, down the street from UD‘s office, and they’re no-laptop. UD hasn’t been there yet, but she’s thinking about the irony or whatever it is of cafés beginning to look like her laptop-free classrooms… One of the commenters suggests that the squatters use public libraries instead, but this location lacks the pleasant human buzz, the soft North African music, and the aroma that squatters (and the rest of us) are after.

I’ve noticed squatters in the Starbucks at George Washington University’s library (I go there a lot to pick up lunch) – always the same people, always there, at tables bristling with computers and phones.

Er, not exactly. What Carlos Slim, world’s richest man, said a few hours ago to UD and 25,000 other people at the George Washington University graduation on the national mall, was “God forgives our sins, but our nervous systems don’t.”

He was trying to say that it’s okay to make mistakes in life, “but try to make them small ones.” God may forgive us, but we might not forgive ourselves, and the guilt we feel will play havoc with our nervous system. The line got a laugh.

Maybe the Washington Post writer got it wrong – and in his misconstrual made the statement meaningless – because of Slim’s strong accent.

Slim’s words certainly weren’t drowned out by the protesters who hoped to silence him (they argue that he shouldn’t have gotten an honorary degree, because of what they take to be his unethical business practices). La Kid, who as one of the GW graduates sat much closer to the protesters, said it was “a little awkward” as they blew their horns and all. Those of us in the family and friends section of the mall heard almost nothing of them.

Slim’s address was pleasantly at odds with the bland upbeat dare to be great business UD had been hearing at the two graduation events – a smaller one just for GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, and today’s immense spectacle on the mall – she attended this weekend. Not that Slim was downbeat — not at all. But he took seriously the tragic nature of life, spoke of our tendencies to drag ourselves down, our self-destructive drives…

Against Slim’s flickering old world, bright blue USA shone like mad — the huge sky over the mall burned with full sun, the handsome newscaster who gave the commencement address made us laugh, and on either side of our white chairs neoclassical buildings glistened.

Endless jets arched out of left field, then passed behind the Washington Monument and away. The newscaster reminded us of all the other artifacts of air and space in the museum behind us – American capsules that broke out of the atmosphere.

He reminded the students that they’d been the first, on the night Bin Laden was killed, to rush over to the White House and cheer; and they cheered now, at the reminder.

At one point in the proceedings dark clouds massed behind us, over the Capitol building, but then – typical Americans – thought better of it and fell back into blue.

After the ceremony, after tracking down La Kid and making a fuss about her and watching another graduate have her picture taken as she stood between two police-mounted horses (“Now go out and change the world,” said one of the riders, and the student said “I will sir, thanks.”), Les UDs walked to the new Teaism at Penn Quarter and had Thai Chicken Curry.

… meeting of the Garrett Park Town Council last night, UD perked up when the town administrator announced that one of UD‘s neighbors would be raising chickens — building a chicken coop in her backyard. All of the townspeople gathered in the Town Hall perked up.

Most of the meeting had been about important things – revisions to our land use ordinance in particular. Yet watching the Town Council eke out its new language word for word (“Is it possible to have a roofless oriel?”) was trying for those of us in attendance (regular readers know that UD reports on Garrett Park’s monthly Town Council meetings for the Bugle, the town paper), while hearing about chickens sent a thrill through the room.

Chickens! When Les UDs bought their Garrett Park house, they found the remains of two chicken coops at the top of their property, and for one mad moment thought about repairing and using them…

After the meeting was over, UD chatted outside the Town Hall (it was a dark wet night; it had been a dark wet afternoon, the sort that deepens the already deep green of the town’s rampant gardens and trees) with Chris, our last mayor.

“Chickens!” said UD. “But won’t that just encourage our foxes?”

“The more encouragement the better,” he answered. “We’re overrun with rabbits.”

… at the Irish Embassy this Bloomsday (June 16) at 6 PM.

A lesser man might tremble at the thought of throbbing out those orgasmic yeses in front of H.E. Ambassador Michael Collins, but not UD! No sir! Lemme at him!

UD has two independent study students this semester. One wrote a paper about postmodern American fiction; the other wrote about this mouthful: consociationalism. Not a word UD knew before she began working with Angela, though it turns out that Mr UD knows all about it, and is in fact a friend of Brendan O’Leary’s, a person who writes a lot on the subject.  Over lunch at Kinkead’s this afternoon, UD and Angela worked through her final draft.

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

For dessert, Angela had
Lemon Sampler.
Angela took photos.

Angela said the meringue tart

“reminds me of Heidi.”

We couldn’t figure out

what the thing in the

foreground is so I called it

Powdered Squishy Lemon.

We had a semi-private table with a

view over Pennsylvania Avenue.

I’m behind the computer, editing.

We shared a pot of

Earl Grey tea.

I ate one of the little

raspberry buttons.

Les UDs are headed downtown, to the national mall, to see the supermoon. If it actually shows up clearly, it should look quite the thing behind the Washington Monument.

I will blog this experience, or non-experience, or whatever.

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

6:20 PM: Excitement building. An hour ago, I listened to an NPR piece about the supermoon in which it is made abundantly clear that the whole thing is hype. I went out to the deck, where Mr UD was writing.

“Let’s not go to the city. I don’t think it’ll be worth it.”

“I tried to tell you the supermoon wasn’t that big a deal but you didn’t listen. I also tried to tell you that there’ll be another supermoon while we’re at the beach, and we can watch the moonrise from our balcony, but you didn’t listen.”

“Yeah yeah yeah. Let’s walk down to the post office at 7:42 and see what we can see.”

“Okay.”

“Meanwhile, how about going to Whole Foods and getting me an asparagus and chicken salad?”

“Okay.”

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

6:29: It’s a strangely cool evening, with massive birdsong coming off of the high trees. As always, I’m transfixed by the self-harmonizing thrush. I try to distinguish its eeohlay from routine squawks and pips, from the mourning dove’s drone. The fearless gray and black catbird with the big black eyes – it follows me around while I mow the lawn – lands two feet away from me and drinks from the stone bath. It has a sharp, harsh cry.

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

8:59 PM: After dinner — chicken and asparagus salad; Mexican cole slaw; iced tea poured from a cocktail shaker La Kid got as a gift from one of her friends

— Les UDs headed over to the post office, one of the few places in the overgrown arboretum which is Garrett Park in which you can actually see more than a little of the sky. But the sky was cloudy and still quite light, and though, sitting on a bench by the CSX tracks adjacent to the P.O., UD was able to make out one distant star, that was all she could see. The supermoon was supermooning elsewhere.

Still, it’s a beautiful night out there, with a cool breeze; and it’s always good to see the town’s roses blooming, and to smell the honeysuckles and viburnums.

… as she scanned the program for this year’s graduation events at George Washington University (La Kid is graduating): Carlos Slim, The Richest Man in the World, is going to be honored, which is great large-giftwise, but he’s rather controversial.

And now a group called Two Countries One Voice is asking GW to reconsider.

I disturbed, while gardening,
a fucking big snake.

My foot was right on the fucker.

Looked like this:

I’m still trembling a bit.

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

Went back out there.

To face my fears, baby!

And there it was, just
like that picture up there.

So I looked at it for awhile.
It didn’t move.

Then I came back in.

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

8:09 PM.

I’m in the front garden – it’s still light out, and the birds are making an absolutely insane racket. (I’m here for the wood thrushes.)

Suddenly one of our orange foxes races across the lawn right in front of me – frightened, maybe, by a train.

The fox was a bright slender flash against the dark green.

… fox barking just outside our bedroom window this morning.

… writes an amusing and enlightening opinion piece in the Washington Post, about the Cartagena scandal. Roberto used to be a merchant seaman:

When I worked on ships, seamen were a superstitious lot. When there was a bad storm, while the ship pitched and rolled, the crew, unable to eat or sleep, would gather in the messroom and grumble. Anyone who remembers Coleridge’s ancient mariner knows that seamen don’t blame the wind and tides for bad weather and rough seas. Rather, they blame a fellow member of the crew — someone who has, say, killed an albatross. During storms, they’d mumble darkly that a crew member had “Jonah’d” the ship — done something wicked, while ashore, that caused the seas to rise up and take revenge.

Inevitably, someone would point out that the likely cause of the foul weather was that one of our crew had committed the worst sin of all: not paying a whore. All would nod gravely. In my day, seamen were convinced that this was such a serious infraction it could threaten a ship’s survival. More than once I saw fellow crew members, who’d come back to the ship so drunk they couldn’t remember where they’d been, make superhuman efforts to send money to a woman ashore in a desperate attempt to avoid the curse of the unpaid prostitute.