Love is in the air. At least for my orb weavers. Two female garden spiders are hanging out at my place. One is in the dog run, and the other is out by the pool. Each is flanked by webs spun by their male counterparts. I don’t know how they decide to get together or who comes calling on whom. All I know is the victorious male will die shortly after the deed is done. I wonder if he knows that? Does die happy? The female will then lay her eggs in a nice sack and probably pass on sometime after the first frost.

I just found a burr in my hair which makes me think I might be sitting around too much. Although, I do a lot of work outside and it’s possible it just blew in there yesterday, or maybe it caught on one of my gloves and I scratched my head. At least I hope that’s the case. I’d hate to think I walked around all week with that burr in plain sight. I’d rather not be one of those old men who looks like he just rose up from the dirt. I have a better self image than that.

I’m in a pickle. I have a spot on a back lot where I want to create a little garden area. I’ve set up some old fence panels to act as a trellis. I’ve got seeds for vines to grow there. I have numerous flowering plants at my disposal. In the center, however, I want a tree, but if I want it to grow to any size while I’m still alive, it will have to be a fast grower, and I’m more a fan of slow. The latter are sturdy trees with fine grained wood, and long lived. The former are brittle, drop branches, and die quick.

My time traveling self went on an adventure last night. At about 3:30 this morning, I found myself back at my first job out of college. I wanted to give my young self some advice. But I knew it was too late, so I just felt sad and spent a few moments wandering around looking at the awards on my office wall, wondering why in the world I felt so self-assured, and thinking about the mistakes I made.

I think I have a neat and tidy life. Everything well ordered. Everything in its place. Then I clean a closet and mysteries unfold and worlds come unlocked. There’s a box full of small dolls my wife collected, featuring a geisha under glass that I bought in Tokyo. The Wilson family bible once again sees the light of day, a book most liked printed in the 30s, a compendium of births and deaths. A program for the first game ever played in the Astrodome in 1965 sits in its protective envelope.

I have a bobo on my forehead. I hit it with my trunk lid while putting a sack of topsoil in the trunk. I felt very much the fool then, and I still feel very much the fool. Apparently, fully opening my trunk lid is a skill I have failed to master, even at my advanced age. I compound the sin by having done it before, reaching in to get my golf clubs. You’d think I’d learn, but apparently it is not a lesson my brain wants to register.

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.