We have a dedicated wildflower garden. It was beautiful for a number of years. But an over abundance of red ants and wind combined to turn it into grassland. What seeds the ants failed to take into their burrows, were blown on the wind to other yards and fields. I can’t do anything about the wind, but I’ve dealt with the ants, and yesterday I reseeded the garden. Today, I’ll do a light topdressing of soil, and then it’s the winter-wait for spring.

I got my flu and Covid shots on Friday. One in each arm. Both arms hurt. No reaction otherwise to speak of from either shot. I feel protected now. But there’s no telling how any of the bugs might mutate, so I’m still avoiding crowds in tight spaces if I can help it. I’m in the old demographic, and have no desire to join the dead demographic. Besides, I’ve got plenty to do around the house.

I have six glass balls, each a little bigger than a baseball. They’re clear with bubbles in them. Two are tinted gold, or maybe orange. They are flattened a bit at a point so that they sit steady when placed and don’t roll away. They used to have bases that lit up, with a light shining through the ball. There’s only one base left. It, with its ball, is on the mantle. The rest sit on window sills to catch the light of the sun.

I was visiting with a friend the other day and we were talking about music and listening, the type of listening you have to do to really hear a symphony or a concerto and he made an interesting observation. He thought a great many people simply listened to music just to drown out the silence, because they were afraid of the silence.

It’s a cool clear morning here at my semi-country abode. I say semi because the big trucks whine down the highway on one side. I say country because the heifers and their calves are standing in the pasture on the other side watching the house. One of the calves is eating at his mother's buffet. I went out to say hello, and they just stood there, looking. We’ve always had the cows and the calves, but the highway sound has grown over the years. Maybe they’ll put in a by-pass because civilization is noisy.

The thing I most enjoy about the re-exploration of my classical music collection is the time it takes to listen to one work, and the attention that needs paying to do so. If I look away for even an instant, the music becomes elevator music and when I look back I have no idea how the music got to where it is or why the composer wanted me there. I’ve picked up the stylus and gone back more times than I can count this week.

From what I can see with the naked eye, the moon has company this morning in the eastern sky. Castor, Pollux and Jupiter are hanging close at hand, with Venus down below watching at a distance. Two stars, two planets. It’s a nice view from the end of the porch. Of course the water tower is there too, just above the tree line. It’s home to the radio that sends me my internet signal.

I started writing down one path this morning, got to the end and decided to double back and do something different. Partly, the original idea seemed sort of half-baked and it failed to get my heart racing. Of course, I don’t generally want my heart to be racing, but at least I like to feel pumped, even if it’s just slightly at what I’ve written down. Oddly enough, the callback came when I took a short break and walked outside. It’s nice and cool this morning.

I noticed an odd little detail in the coverage of the recent celebrity killing. There was an abundance of video footage of the shooter before and after the event. Good quality, too. And I imagine what we saw was only a taste of what the authorities had. It appears we’re on TV way more often than we realize, in places we might never expect it. Being of a literary bent, it reminds me of the Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. He was always watching.

The recent rains and coolness have returned a little color to the land. Where once it was all about brown, the green is back. I had to mow for the first time in a month yesterday. Not an onerous chore because of my big riding mower, but dusty and noisy even though I wear ear protection. I even did a little weeding in the north garden, trying to free it of grass mostly so that the other little plants could grow next spring.

They peered inside my body to look at my prostate and found nothing of concern. Now we’re left to wonder what’s up with my slightly elevated PSA numbers, although it’s likely to be only my age, which is advanced. So, we’ll watch and test and I’ll get to know my urologist, just as I know my cardiologist, my ENT specialist, my vascular surgeon, my gastroenterologist, and my GP. A phalanx of well educated people doing their best to keep me alive.

I like periodic flowers. The ones that show up just for the briefest of moments. The ones you see only if you're looking. For instance, in the dead grass of the back lots, I now have rain lilies, which as the name suggests means they come up after a rain. I also have schoolhouse flowers that are now blooming in their September, welcome back to school display. Lovely blooms in both cases.

I appear to be in that time of life when medicine is now the rule. In the last five years, I’ve had an aneurysm repaired, my back adjusted, skin growths removed, and my head scanned. And that doesn’t count bouts with Covid and sinus infections. Yesterday, they took a picture of my prostate. Who knows what they’ll see. The last one in March, a casual look, during scans to check my stents, was normal. So, anything there hasn’t been there long. Of course, the unknown is always imagined as the worst, but we’ll see.

I had a family weekend. Spent a lovely Friday evening with my wife’s cousin and his wife. We reminisced, talked about the future, and I played them a few songs. The next morning I headed slightly north for a nephews wedding, the son of my brother-in-law. There I caught up with my son and his wife. It was a good day, and I stayed long enough to let the party get started before turning the evening over to the young ones. I drove home Sunday morning.

I am adrift this morning in the music of Bach. The Brandenburg Concertos, 1, 3, and 4. I confess, however, I have no idea, without looking, when each one starts or ends. They play on my turntable, and at some point I will get up and flip the record over. It occurs to me that it might be time to take a deeper dive into the music, and really learn it. I’m retired. It’s too hot to work outside, and why not?

I was born into a world of 78 rpm records. Then came 33-⅓ followed by 45. They got me through my teens. I ignored eight tracks, no car, but liked cassettes and made lots of mix tapes. CDs were a big deal. We had intense discussions about digital vs analog sound quality, and I never could get my wife to leave the CDs in their cases. The digital revolution introduced me to ripping, but I never like file sharing, too buggy. I owned a Walkman and eventually an IPod.

It was weird-dream night yesterday. At the end of my first sleep, I made a long shot from nearly halfcourt with one second left to win the game, only to have time put back on the clock. The other team scored, and they won the game. In my second sleep, a salesman stopped by to scope out a project and as we walked onto the porch I noticed a big fire in town, close to the house. Embers were falling on the lawn and fires were starting. I looked west to see if the fire had spread. It had. A big fire tower used for training was burning. I was surrounded by fire. That woke me up, too.

I labored yesterday on Labor Day. It seemed fitting. A friend came over and we did a makeover. We dismantled an artifact of my previous life and made it into something new. It was an entertainment center, perfectly designed to house CDs, DVDs, and VHS tapes with a big space for the TV to sit. It was a well constructed, heavy-duty piece of furniture. But it came in parts, so I removed some of them. The top half to be exact.

Labor Day. It used to mean the end of summer for me, with school right around the corner. But today school starts in August. Thankfully, I’m too old for school. And the dress code used to change as well. No more white shoes. Or straw hats. Does anyone pay attention to that anymore? I doubt it. Not in a day and age when people wear blue jeans to church, and shorts everywhere. And I can’t remember when I saw a pair of white shoes on an adult male.

There’s a warm stillness in the air, fed no doubt by rain, the air is just too heavy to move, laden with moisture as it is. We expect a wet weekend, but the rain will be spotty and I doubt any of the rivers will flow because of it. Although maybe the odds will fall in the river’s favor and it will flow again, at least for a while. I think we’d need more rain than the good earth could handle to get the aquifers back up so that the springs ran once again.