July 2014 - The Cute & the Stinky

This morning I woke up with food poisoning. Zach left something on the counter that I thought was a packed lunch he forgot to take to the car. Turns out it was something that had brought in from his car after it sat steaming in the summer heat for 3 days. So between bouts of illness, I attended to the copious amount of puppy poo I face first thing every morning.  They have been cute and I will miss them and I know each one so well I can identify them by the way they move, but as the first two left this afternoon I sighed with relief. Two more head to their new homes tomorrow and then I will only have 2 baby wolves jumping on and biting my hands while I try to pick up their feces.

After spending my first hour of the day throwing up and scrubbing dog poo, I cleaned up and put on a brave face about playing a 4-hour concert at the farmers’ market.  The vendors kept offering chocolaty baked goods as tips, when all I really wanted was a box of saltines. Andrea kindly played all the songs I don’t like during my mysterious absences from the stage.  After I returned home, I tidied up once more for the new puppy owners, presenting them with a bucolic and perfectly sanitary setting – nothing to hint at what they are likely to encounter when they introduce their new puppy into their home: scratched floors, pee-infused carpets, favorite household items chewed into a thousand pieces across the floor…[If you are reading this, mom and dad, I hope you are happy I am keeping your puppy for you an extra four weeks. I am only doing it because I know how many times you had to clean up after me when I was too young to appreciate it. ]

After the new puppy owners came and left I was blissfully alone. Zach and the kids were down east sailing with their grandparents for the weekend. I picked the last of the sugar snap peas from our garden-turned-jungle and watched the daisies and black-eyed-susans waving in the wind of an oncoming storm. The milkweed flowers were as oversweet as high school poetry and crawling with honey bees. Shiny Japanese beetles were mating on weeds, chewing them into lace while they ignored the nearby kale and lettuce. Now is the top of summer, the time of fireflies, festivals, fireworks and thunderstorms. It’s when the march of flowers slows to a trickle of new blossoms and all the berries start to ripen. Farmers hold their breath for weather windows to dry their hay (and if you have animals that eat hay, you are holding your breath too, happy to see every truck passing with bales on the highway).   The biting flies emerge and everything living wants blood, nectar or water. 

 

I never have time to write about this time of year in Maine because it’s always in full tilt.  But tonight my family is gone sailing and I have shrugged off other possibilities for filling their space. I will sit petting the last of my puppies and try to understand something – as I approach my 39^th year – about the pace of life in this month and why it is so like this time in my life: racing, overworked and overflowing, through a tangle of adorable and disgusting moments that will end in some kind of harvest and then the chill of winding down. The garden will die, the lambs will go to the butcher and we will glimpse, as we sit wondering by the winter fire, how time consumes us too. The only difference between us and the bugs & lambs is that we have a chance to know it by seeing the cycle repeated so many times before ours ends. I imagine millions of ancestors before me contemplating their own fate. And as futile as it seems, wish I could shout a few generations forward to say: if all you manage to do is to pass on your love to your children, you will have succeeded.