Oh, Nico, your abuelo is getting old!

It's good. 

 It's good that you are old. 

 That shows you have survived

 a long time.

Long hours for the webelos scout

Porter was up at 6:30 this morning.

Probably the longest day of  his summer so far

Counting the minutes until 4 o'clock when I had promised

 to take him off to Camp Yawgoog.

Enemies

I am implacable -- a ruthless harasser of my enemy.  A tangerine hued nemesis called the oriental bittersweet.  Not the tethering vine, the round-leafed sprout, the dark leaved, woody, sun-starved shrub.  Those are only its most superficial disguises -- its forays into the light.  

No, I know that the soul and body of my enemy is the orange root-vine lurking, linking dark redoubt to dark redoubt underneath the moss and fallen leaves.  I snap the shoots, cut the vinestems -- attack the supply lines for sugar and carbon.  But it's only when the hairy, orange rootbody comes up that I feel the grim, satisfying pang of a blow well-struck.

Last summer's challengers, the poison ivy and the greenbrier still send out their scouts and their sneaking runners, but I dispatch them without malice.  I have my enemy.

Mark Twain on George W. Bush:

"His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket 

and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere."

Photo by Nico B.

Nico's view: a six-year old takes the camera

Catbirds stood by for the rosy flesh of discarded melon.

M. snapped asparagus spears from their bed beneath the rhubarb

Photos by Nico B.