It’s not the heat… yes, it is.

I had forgotten the kind of New England summer day where you bake for a sunny, hot, dry morning but slowly, surely the humidity begins to rise.  There is an increasing feeling of being under pressure, as if you were trapped inside a balloon with someone pressing down from the outside.  The light has taken on that greenish pinkish tint that makes me instinctively want to scurry under something non-conductive and stay there.  There is barely any breeze; the leaves on the maples and oaks are all jittering but the wind hasn’t arrived yet.  The juncos and goldfinches know something is up; there is a flurry around the freshly-filled bird feeder.

The storm is coming.

Squirrel Skirmishes

The squirrel is back.

He clings, head-down to the bark of the maple, bright-eyed and calculating. My shouting and hissing at him from the window barely registers a twitch of his tail.  He cares nothing for the goldfinches whose food he plans to steal, nor the hummingbirds whose nectar spills uselessly on the ground when he leaps to the shepherds crook hanger that holds both feeders.

I have named him Onan.

Coating the crook with WD-40 baffled him for about 20 minutes. The errant Doberman is a sometime check to his forays but hardly enough to prevent him from hanging upside down from the $2 feeder in order to jimmy out the black ‘Nyger’ seed. There is an opportunistic chipmunk on the ground beneath him, toadying and twitting encouragement as it gleans amongst the spillage.

I am off to buy a Super Soaker water gun.