It’s close to
midnight, and still the northern sky is glowing faintly in a shade of pink that
reminds me of the adobe houses in South and Central America. The sun set at a
quarter past ten, and will rise at five tomorrow morning, and it hardly gets
dark enough to see the stars during the time in between. Only once in a while a
slight breeze stirs the leaves, an almost imperceptible sigh, and my feet are
wet from the dew that has settled on the grass already. A few mosquitoes whine
around my head, not enough to be bothersome, and when I walk up to the house
from the bush a bat darts by on its nightly hunt.It is June at its most glorious,
and it feels as if summer could last forever.
Yet the lilac hedge, a
symphony of scent for about two weeks at the beginning of the month, has only a
few lavender blossoms left, and the swallowtails, as surely a part of June as
the lilac blossoms, have moved over to the other side of the garden, feeding on
the wild roses along the poplar grove. Last week, stretching my aching back
after hoeing, I noticed a flash of orange dipping in and out of the hedge, a
butterfly as big as the swallowtail. Curious, I slowly followed it until it
came to rest and started to feed, wings quivering slightly. This was no odd-coloured swallowtail: its
tangerine wings were marked with black bars, and their tips were patterned like
stained-glass windows, intricately carved like a black-paper silhouette. It
looked familiar, but I was sure I had never seen one like it here. Excited, I
ran back to the house to consult my butterfly book, and soon found what I was
looking for: it was a monarch! I read that there have been sightings here, but
that they are quite rare. Yet they breed here in Alberta before they make their
long migration back to central Mexico, over 3500 km. What a treat to find one
in my garden! A few days later I saw it again among the wild roses, and this
time it was not alone: there was a second one. Will they be part of the June
landscape from now on? Time will tell, and I will keep my eyes open.
I did, of course, not
come from the garden when I walked through the dew-wet grass a little while
ago. It was quite a different job that took me outside so late at night, a job I had to take on a few days ago and
that regulates my time quite strictly.
About five weeks ago Maya found a
pregnant cat on the road not far from our house and thought she had been
abandoned. Inquiries in the neighbourhood determined that this cat did indeed
belong to a neighbour about half a kilometer away, but that they had three more
pregnant cats and wouldn’t miss this one if it didn’t come back.
Since Leo is not exactly
known to be gentle with cats we fed her in a tree house Magnus and Carl
built many years ago and let her decide for herself if she wanted to stick around or not. It
turned out that she was scared of Leo but would stand her ground, and soon he
had the first bloody scratch on his nose. The cat was here to stay!
(to be continued)
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