Time for my annual (sort of) farewell summer column.
I have no regrets. I have chewed, swallowed and ingested every part of this summer to the fullest. Enjoyed its sunsets and beautiful warm days. Made certain that sipping cool drinks on the deck and eating dinner at outside cafés were a priority. I haven’t short-changed one minute of my summer with unnecessary activities like house cleaning, weeding gardens or ironing clothes.
But, yellow birch leaves spiraling to the ground and cooling northern breezes tell me it’s time to say farewell to the summer of 2012.
The past three months have had some unique moments. Without a doubt I have become acquainted with more tree frogs this summer than any other summer of my life. My first tree frog visitor of the summer, LeRoy, came as the final spring frosts were still icing my deck and made his home in the withered remnants of last year’s parsley planter. He has long departed.
The final frog of the season appeared yesterday when I cleaned the recycling bin on the deck. He was the same little guy I’d seen at night on the other side of my kitchen window glass, suction-cupped in place and looking at me as if I were the intruder.
In between, several small green frogs have appeared, one showing up around July 4th to delight my grandchildren, the other perching on the house entry step, forcing us humans to step carefully.
This summer’s most bizarre tree frog appearance was in the birdhouse in my back yard. Birds have totally ignored this birdhouse for several years, but one recent morning, a bizarre (you might even call it “ugly”) face watched me from the entry hole. It was a tree frog who hung out there for about a week, startling us with its strange appearance.
Cutworms were another unique and, I might add, not pleasant, aspect of this summer. The carrot crop I so carefully planted (and you have to admit those seeds are tiny) never made it past the first tiny sprouts. I focused blame on a cheeky chipmunk who believed my back yard belonged to him until the tiny lettuce leaves growing in my deck planter suffered the same fate. They disappeared, but several very fat cutworms hadn’t, as I discovered when digging up the soil for replanting. The second lettuce batch vanished into thin air, and I gave up.
Frogs and worms were only a small part of this summer. Warm, hazy days enhanced picnics, July 4th celebrations and festivities from one end of the county to the other. The summer was beautiful for golf, fishing, blueberry picking and just plain lounging.
But suddenly, autumn has arrived, and reluctantly I put my flip-flops away and think about buying winter gloves and maybe new hiking boots and getting out in the crisp air under blue autumn skies. No sense moping about a bygone summer.
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