I’m on a new computer. Well, newer than my old but not really new, new. It’s used. Anyway, except for the operating system, I’m trying to exist outside the Microsoft Universe. I am not sure it’s worth the effort. I am an old dog and I miss the software where I performed my old tricks. At the moment, it seems as though I've simply traded one all encompassing tech universe for another. Still, I have to try because I’m engaging in a collaborative effort with my daughter and she knows the new universe.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Aesop’s fox and his unattainable grapes. He tried. He failed. He walked away. To ease the pain, he decided the grapes were probably sour and not worth having. Nice move actually. He kept his self-esteem, and moved on to hunt for other grapes more accessible. And while he was hunting, maybe he had time to think about how he went about getting the grapes and came across a new method, something different to employ so that the next time he encountered high grapes, they’d be his.

I think in the short term the new garden area along the north fence is complete. I moved the bottle tree from its old spot behind the big oaks and the new gazebo to a spot by the young chinquapin. Now, when I look out the kitchen window I see a tableau. The bottle tree, the oak, an upright rosemary, a statue of St. Francis, a talavera pot, a metal buzzard, a yellow bells, a sage, and gregg’s mist flower. The living and the inanimate.

Spent yesterday in mostly contemplative silence broken only by two requests for directions from store clerks and a song I sang in my bedroom as I played my guitar. Did three loads of wash. Practiced putting on the living room carpet. Took a short walk. Fixed a pot of navy beans. Watched the PGA championship, and spent some time sorting out my needs and desires. I’ve found it’s important that one gets those in the right buckets because you can go broke financially and emotionally if you mix them up.

I turned my bird bath into a bird feeder. It was an accident. The bird bath dried up and I watched a little finch land in it and start picking at whatever was lying about. I had some extra bird seed left, so I took it out and poured it into the dry bird bath. Here they came, the avian dinosaurs. A summer tanager. A cardinal. A house finch. They landed. They ate. They left. I’m going grocery shopping today. I think I’ll pick up an inexpensive bag of feed and see what happens.

I made a mistake. I started a new garden. Stopped. Changed direction. Here was the mistake. Rather than continuing to dig up grass and turn dirt I decided to put down landscape material. I have no idea why I thought that was a good idea. But I did. Hauled in mulch. It looked nice for about three months. Then the bermuda grass did what bermuda grass does. It grew. Through the landscape cloth, over the cloth, and in the cloth.

There are ups and down to living at the urban/country interface. Deer are the best downside example. Luckily, there’s enough country around me that the woods offer better habitat than my yard. Scorpions are another. Found one in the kitchen this morning. I took it back outside. Mostly I find their desiccated bodies in the house. There’s no water and little food. Once upon a time we had a pest control service spray the outside of the house, but stopped because of the dog.

It’s a summer morning in May. We touched 100 yesterday, and you can feel yesterday’s heat this morning. Still, there’s a special pleasure to be found in an early morning walk around the yard, feeding the cats, feeling the breeze, and looking at the plants. The Crape Myrtles, for instance, are getting ready to bloom and we have a fair collection of them around the place.

Stood outside last night in the light of the full moon. A glorious sight. The pasture was calm and well lit. I thought of our ancestors as they walked the savannah on such a night. Or did they walk at all because it exposed them to predators. And what did they think of that dim bright light in the night sky, so different from the sun, yet still a source of light in a time of darkness. A mystery to them for sure.

One of these days I think I’ll ask one of the AI programs to write me 300 words in three paragraphs on some topic that strikes my fancy. Although, frankly, I’m terrified it will do a much better job than I ever could. Still, I think it might be fun. After all, it’s drawing on the writings of some fairly good people, and I’d still have to edit it and get it ready for publication. And I’ve heard that the prompt you use to get the outcome you want is fairly important. So, that would keep me involved.

We graduated a grand-daughter from college yesterday. Now she’s on to graduate school, and work in her chosen field which appears to be sports information. I say this because the world is changing fast, and I think chosen fields in general are drying up faster than corn in a hard drought. We laughed, at first, about the commencement speaker, a local weatherman, but I thought his speech about preparedness was spot on. 

We buried the kitten. Actually, my son buried her. He found her in the grass beneath the small cluster of oaks. There was no sign of a struggle or any damage. He dug her a grave beneath the trees and covered it with limestone rocks to keep the digging scavengers away. All around are turks caps, rock roses, and spiderworts. A nice resting place.

An American Pope. My boyhood, Catholic school kid heart is happy. My mother would be beside herself as would be the nuns who taught me, mostly Sisters of Charity in their starched, white-winged habits. I doubt any of them ever imagined that a kid from the South Side of Chicago who graduated from Villanova would make that journey. But here he is and we can talk to his brothers and they’re telling us all about him. He likes the White Sox. A baseball Pope. It feels good.

There were days, and in the not too distant past, when I was up in the morning and moving fast. At home, on the road, wherever I was, the alarm rang and the day started. It was time to get up and write, or get up and go to work, or just get up and go. A day was afoot and it shouldn’t be wasted. There were words to find or roads to drive or things to get done around the house. I was a going and doing machine. The world was a set of class five rapids and I was good with the paddle.

We appear to be down one cat. One of the feral kittens has disappeared, although she’s old enough by now to no longer truly qualify for that appellation. It’s just that her mother is still here and I call her momma cat, thus her kittens are still kittens. Everyone was fixed early on, so it’s unlikely to be for reasons of love. And food is always plentiful, so I doubt she wandered off looking for better lodging. I guess it will just be a mystery as to where she went. I do hope she’s in good health, but it’s unlikely we’ll ever know the story. And that’s the way of the country.

A blessed rain is falling this morning in my piece of the Hill Country. Slow and steady. No breezes signalling a fast moving storm although thunderstorms are forecast for later this morning. We shall see. We’ve been a blank spot recently when it comes to meeting forecasts. Rain all around, but none for us. It happened last Friday evening. There was rain just down the road, but none fell on my little town.

An interesting thing has happened to me as I age. My paradigm of how I see the world has shifted. It started when I began wrestling with the idea that the sun didn’t actually rise or set. It was earth doing the moving, and I wanted to shift my language to say that. It continued to change when I realized, several months ago, that seeing was a passive activity. Light was coming to me. So, last night, as I did a three a.m. ramble and stood outside under the stars, my face turned skyward, I knew I was being bathed in starlight, in much the same manner as when I stand beneath a warm shower. Interesting feeling.

In this time of my disappearing, my aging, my eventual demise, I am not unhappy, depressed nor otherwise distressed. In fact, as I have been through all my other phases, my childhood moves, my sojourn in the Navy, my trip through higher education, marriage, children, and various career changes, I am excited for the opportunity. The past is very much the past, and now is what I have to live for, and I want to ensure it is time well spent. It is a chance to learn.

I felt myself enter into a new period of my life in November of 2023. It happened when I came down from Guadalupe Peak, exhilarated and tired, exhausted more precisely. I’ve mentioned this before and I mention it again because now, as usually happens with my new life phases, it’s coming into sharper focus. It’s the time of disappearing. And I think it’s a universal thing that happens to all of us as we age and make our way out the door or down the drain of life.

Fed the cats this morning and on my way back into the house found a Walnut Sphinx Moth hanging on the screen. What a nice set of wings. Swept back. Ornate. Didn’t seem to be the type of guy to flutter aimlessly around a lit light bulb. It disappeared at first light, or so I imagined. I wasn’t there when it left. I’m not sure what it will eat around here, we don’t have many trees it might like. I guess the little cherry tree might be considered a nut tree. We’ll have to see.