86 may not sound hot, but we're Mainers, and it's jungle-like. Were it a dry heat, instead of a muggy, oppressive one, no one would mind much. But it's the kind that brings the blackflies (our state bird) hatching up out of their fetid pond sludge to attach themselves inside your ears and nostrils and eyelids.
I don't remember it being this hot in Spain. It must have been at some point. I do remember one day when the thin shadow along a low fence was enough to excite one quite beyond reason. And then you'd run over and bask in it for a moment, before trudging back out again and up the next dusty rise. It was always on the city outskirts, with the radiating cement and the pounding feet and the unattractive buildings sending up waves of heat in the distance. There was one endless sidewalk......7 miles long.....
Anyway. Back to what I was saying.
Every once in a while a blessed breeze twitches through the trees and rolls sluggishly across the grounds, but other than that...Well, it's blooming awful. Speaking of blooming-the apple trees are! All bursting at once. Today we had petals tripping in through the front door.
As a sort of miserably macabre end-of-May farewell, our beautiful goat caught a raging infection and passed on today. We tried to give her a chance to recover (turns out not such a good idea; would have been best to let her go out earlier but she wasn't really in pain then....It's so difficult to tell with animals). I was fairly torn up about it, but a good friend (who's had much experience with this sort of thing) put on a bracing demeanor and, giving a solemn cyber-space back pat, said "sometimes being a farmer sucks."
Ah well. The goat had a good life, eating all our trees and leaping up on cars and butting the donkey and generally being cute and sassy.
Spring is definitely here though, and with it, as it should be, gardening.
We've put in plant-sale romaine and oak leaf lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, all of which may even survive, if the now-grown skunk from yesteryear ceases his nighttime buffet trips.
We've even got some parsleys and leeks; tiny little things, but they'll pull through. One of my favourite things about plants is their resilience. You stick the seedlings in the ground looking bedraggled, and the next day, after a bit of water, sun and acclimation, there they are, straight up and perky.
The Junebugs appeared the other night. We weren't on our toes about shutting the doors in time, so they all pelted about in dizzying circles, bouncing off the lamps and the 11-foot ceiling, with me chasing after them swooping a yoghurt container through the air. They seemed to prefer latching onto my hands with their persistently clingy, spiney little legs, which had me a bit squeamish at first, having actively perpetuated the idea of escaping scrabbling Scarab beetles with my colleague as (smaller) children thanks to The Mummy. (The two do look a bit alike though!)
http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/resources/identification/animals/bug-id/alphabetic-list-of-bugs/scarab-beetles
http://stlouispestcontrolblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/june-bug-.jpg
The cats, of course, hadn't had such fun since the Christmas Tree Ornament Massacre of a couple years ago. (Tinsel everywhere, angels missing wings. Awful business.) Moxie kept pinning the whizzing beetles to the carpet and I'd have to rush over and cup them up and let them buzz off into the dark outside.Despite the heat, I am glad summer's here: I love watering and listening to the ground thirstily soak it all up. Standing in the soft night and listening to all those sounds which you never hear in wintertime (Cause the party don't stop at sunset round here). Lying in tree shadows reading.
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