Monday, June 30, 2008








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.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

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.





Saturday, June 28, 2008

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.

Friday, June 27, 2008



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.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

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.