Summer Delights

For Bow, it's the little things that matter.

In the summer, he gets Pickle Ice from his friend Charla.

Bow has been getting better at managing the Pickle Ice eating process. I give him a plastic measuring cup, and toward the end, he dumps what is left of the ice into the measuring cup and drinks it all up.

Meanwhile, I go wandering all over the property, to see what I can see.

It turns out there is more than one butterfly milkweed plant on my property, and the one that is deep within the unmown pasture is much more vital than the one by the fence line. It has many more blossoms on it.

Occasionally, a green sparkling sweat bee is attracted to the butterfly milkweed, but despite its name, I have never seen a butterfly attracted to its blooms.

The pipevine swallowtail much prefers the tall phlox by the lagoon. All the tall phlox flowers are at their loveliest, just now.

Even the sumac blossoms are lovely, once you get close enough to see them clearly.

Sometimes a tree that has been felled by a storm and chopped down, and hacked to pieces, and left by the wayside turns out to not be quite dead. "I'm not quite dead yet!" it seems to shout.

The remainder of the cottonwood tree is sprouting green new branches.

On the Fourth of July, we chose fireworks that gave off much light, but not too much noise to avoid upsetting Bow and the dogs.

The next day it rained. and in the morning an armadillo was rooting in the front yard.

Such is our quiet, domestic life. Life from death. Death from life. Beauty and decay. But there is also language.

What does Bow talk about? Not much, these days. The other day he asked for more milk, and I gave him a big lecture about how there was milk in his cereal and he hadn't finished it, and about how wasteful that was. He patiently listened, and then he spelled : טוב.

That means "good", but can also be a way of saying "okay." It took me a moment to interpret that. How did this relate to the big lecture I had just given him about not wasting food? But then I realized that by "okay", he meant: "Okay, give me the cereal bowl, and I will finish it." And so I did, and he did.

Bow does not make big speeches. But that does not mean he does not understand perfectly well how to use language effectively.  There is nothing all that brilliant or revolutionary about this kind of language use. It's what most humans use language for most of the time, too. It's a very rare occasion when any human being says something truly revolutionary. Not even on the Fourth of July.

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