We made three attempts throughout the week to evict Rabbit from the garden. Each time the little bun evaded us and disappeared not to be flushed out. This morning we tried again but Rabbit was nowhere to be found. We gave up and watered the garden since we’ve had almost a whole week without rain and the last couple of days have been hot ones. I thought for certain Rabbit would be rustled out of hiding while we watered, but nope. Dare we hope that Rabbit has departed? Alas, no. James saw the bun crouched among the beans this afternoon. We will make another eviction attempt this evening when it’s not so hot out.

I haven’t seen Chippy Chipmunk all week. But the sparrows are busy as are the cardinals, chickadees, and jays. While there is significantly more milkweed growing throughout the garden than there was five years ago, there are alarmingly few monarch butterflies. And while I’ve got lots of tomatoes and other vegetables that require pollination services, the bee population is also distressingly low. The hyssop is blooming and a few years ago it was literally buzzing from all the bees on it while also giving the appearance it would fly away at any moment from all the butterflies. This year, there is perhaps one butterfly and a couple of bees at any given time. 

Alarms should be ringing, governments should be urgently passing laws and creating policies to support and increase pollinators globally. Three-fourths of the world’s flowering plants and about thirty-five percent of the world’s food crops depend on pollinators. It’s not honeybees, but bees in general, also birds, bats, wasps, flies, beetles, and moths.

Of course the US government website provides helpful suggestions about how you personally can help pollinators by leaving dandelions in your grass, planting native flowers, installing a bat house in your yard, and limiting your use of pesticides. Meanwhile, the big corporate farms are plowing from fence to fence, planting GMO monocultures, and pouring pesticides like glyphosate all over them. Glyphosate, also known as Round Up, has as high as a 94% bee mortality rate. But you, you can make a difference by not killing dandelions! 

You may think you have no way to impact corporate agribusiness, but if you eat, which I’m pretty sure we all do, don’t buy their pesticide laden produce. Grow some of your own food. Buy from local farmers. Eat in-season and buy organic. I know it can be expensive, and there are many people who don’t even have a grocery store in their neighborhood, but if you are among those who are not scraping to get by, it’s a matter of priorities. You might need to forego your daily Starbucks coffee or make your own lunch instead of buying it everyday. Making a small personal sacrifice to eat local and organic is not a large price to pay to keep pollinators alive. Because dandelions in your yard are not going to do it and if most of the pollinators die then we do too.

In spite of the noticeable decline of pollinators, the ones who are still around are working hard. I’ve got tomatoes bigger than my fist that I am salivating over, anticipating their ripening. I’ve got pumpkins and butternut squashes. I’ve got beans and flowers. I’ve got bush cherries beginning to ripen and chokeberries and apples.

Speaking of apples, I have two trees in my front yard. One of the trees closest to the house is taller than the roof. During the day, every now and then, we hear an apple hit the roof from a squirrel up there having a snack. This happens every year and when it’s an apple year like it is this year, there are plenty to go around so we don’t get too upset.

Friday night however, we were woken up around midnight by the sound of apples dropping onto the roof, rolling down, and then splatting onto the ground. What the heck? I thought at first it was the wind and I tried to go back to sleep. But no, the thud, roll, splat kept happening and it came at pretty regular intervals. Squirrels are not active at night. But raccoons are and this trash panda was eating apples and keeping me awake!

I got up, turned on the porch light and shone a flashlight up into the tree. I saw the shape of a smallish raccoon moving around up in the branches away from the light. I stood there a few minutes hoping that was enough to encourage them to leave. Back inside, James and I both settled down and began drifting off to sleep.

Thud! Roll! Splat!

&%$#@$*!!!!!

James had an idea. He got two pans, turned on the porch light and went out and made some noise. Not super loud noise, but if you were in the vicinity and your windows were open you probably heard some cake pans banging together. At first I worried the neighbors were going to be angry, but then I remembered all the times I have been woken up in the wee hours by loud music and loud voices and loud cars and I ceased to care.

After a few minutes, James came back inside, turned off the light, and climbed into bed. And then we both lay there, waiting. Nothing. The raccoon had left and we fell asleep.

Thud! Roll! Splat!

It’s 4 in the morning and our raccoon visitor is back for more apples. Seriously? James wasted no time. Once again, the cake pans were enough to encourage them to depart.

The raccoon did not return Saturday night, but it is hard to believe they will not come back again another time. It’s getting to be a real Wild Kingdom out there these days. James and I joked that next we are going to find a bear in the apple tree or see a coyote leaping the fence or a deer standing in the middle of the garden. We laughed nervously because all of these animals have been sighted in the city and it is not hard to imagine them showing up for a snack because the word has gotten out about the “hidden gem” where everyone who is anyone goes to dine.

Reading

• Book: Poetry: […] by Fady Joudah. Wow, this is a hard hitting collection. There are poems with titles and then there are many poems titled “[…].” Most of the latter are like a stomach punch. Joudah is Palestinian American. Along with being a poet and translator, Joudah is also a practicing physician of internal medicine and has worked with Doctors Without Borders. He and his family currently live in Houston, Texas. It is hard to say I enjoyed this collection given that so much of it refers to people being killed and oppressed. But it is also about survival, resistance, and hope. Not exactly feel good poetry, but necessary poetry.
• Article: The NYT Book Review is Everything Book Criticism Shouldn’t Be by Yasmin Nair.  A great discussion about the New York Times  Book Review and how,  “Reading the Book Review is a joyless task because it is mostly so massively, stiflingly dull. There is a sameness and a flatness to the reviews, held as they are to some invisible set of Times ‘standards,’ the most obvious one of which seems to be, ‘Never be interesting.’” Nair also points out how the Book Review pretty much only reviews books from the big 5 publishers, and how it perpetuates all that is wrong with publishing. Aside from some delightfully snarky take downs, this is also an article with ideas about what book reviews should do. 
• Article: Manufacturing Consent by Annabel Ross. A good summary of the sexual assault allegations again Neil Gaiman. I was disappointed when I heard the news a couple weeks ago. I follow Gaiman on Bluesky where he is so active I considered unfollowing him because his posts filled my feed to the near exclusion of everything else, but as soon as the news broke, he stopped posting completely. 
• Article: The Joy of Reading Books You Don’t Entirely Understand by Molly Templeton. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I love picking up a book now and then that leaves me unmoored because I don’t understand it but the writing is so good and I am getting just enough of a glimmer to keep going. 
• Speculative Fiction Review: Ancillary Review of Books. I recently learned about them and am very much enjoying their articles. Check them out if you enjoy speculative fiction.

Quote

[…]

They did not mean to kill the children.
They meant to.
Too many kids got in the way
of precisely imprecise
one-ton bombs
dropped a thousand and one times
over the children’s nights.
They will not forgive the children this sin.
They wanted to save the from future sins.
Or send them wrapped lifetimes
of reconstructive
surgical hours pro bono,
mental anguish to pass down
to their offspring.
Will the children have offspring?
This is what the bomb-droppers
did not know they wanted:
to see if others will be like them
after unquantifiable suffering.
They wanted to lead
their own study, but forgot
that not all suffering worships power
after survival. What childhood does
a destroyed childhood beget?
My parents showed me the way.

~Fady Joudah, […]

Listening

• Podcast: On Being: Ross Gay On the Insistence of Joy. This is an interview by Krista Tippet that originally aired in July 2019 and I feel like I have heard it before, but also, one can never have too much Ross Gay, and who can’t use a little joy anytime, but especially right now?
• Podcast: Planet Critical: Doing the Right Thing: Gianluca Grimalda. Host Rachel Donald interviews climate researcher Gianluca Grimalda who was fired from his job after he refused to fly back from his field research in Papua New Guinea. He had been allowed “slow travel” for decades, but suddenly the German university he worked for had other ideas. Here he talks about his research and how surprised he is that his refusal to fly and subsequent firing has received so much attention.

Watching

• Movie: Fall Guy (2024). Hey Girl, Ryan Gosling plays a stunt man, one of the best in the business, who breaks his back while filming a stunt. He disappears from the movie biz, leaving his not quite girlfriend (Emily Blunt) angry and wondering what happened. Now she’s directing her first film. He is asked to come and help finish the film, and he ends up being framed for murder. It’s a rom-com with lots of action, humor and explosions.

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

This week James made us some delicious sammies: tempeh, sauerkraut, arugula pesto, and radish slices on homemade whole wheat bread. There was also fresh from the garden salad that included spicy chickpeas. Yum.

But this weekend I get the dessert kudos. It’s James’s birthday and I made him a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting that had fresh strawberries between the cake layers.