©2008, RKSilipo. All rights reserved.
Today I stepped out of the village shop and post office and was face to face with a horse. Three horses in fact. Here the kids ride horses, not bicycles, during summer vacation. The horses were smallish, not gorgeous quarter horses but sturdy farm horses. The girls mounted and rode off toward the village green with their snacks.
It’s hot here today; has been for several days. And humid. Yesterday was so bad I longed for Washington, D.C.’s national galleries and museums — air conditioned and free to get into. Anyone who doubts global warning has but to look at the weather here, in these islands, to see it in action. The winters used to be very cold, with snow, even in London and the West Country. The summers had a few hot days, but always punctuated liberally with overcast and rainy days. Not so any more. Last winter, we had one snow, of less than an inch. It disappeared within an hour. And we haven’t had any rain for over a week. This is not the weather of England that I knew thirty year ago when I first started visiting on a regular basis.
Wildflowers are blooming everywhere. Poppies, bright red-orange; Queen Anne’s lace, with its two-inch wide heads of hundreds of tiny white blossoms; purple thistles, many of which are already drying in the sun; deep pink wild geraniums; tiny yellow cowslips and sky blue bluets; and, of course, the hot yellow of ragweed. Wild roses line a lot of the roads here, with huge arching branches of single pink or white blossoms. And blackberries, the rose’s fruiting cousin, are starting to ripen.
In our garden, the snapdragons from last year threw seeds, so we have patches of yellow blooms in odd places. I put in about a hundred sweet pea seeds in April, and they just started to bloom about ten days ago. Roses, left by the previous owner, are blooming even though we didn’t bother to prune last winter. I’m of two minds about them. I hate to get rid of any plants, but these are so pathetic I often consider pulling them up and starting over with good bare root stock. We’ll see.
Lately we’ve had a nocturnal visitor. We leave the sliding glass door open at night for Joey to go in and out, and to let in cool air. The other night I heard the distinct tinkle of a bell and listened to it for several minutes. The next morning, my frying pan, left on the stove, had been licked clean of chicken gravy. This morning the salmon skin I left out had been eaten, along with all the vegetables on the plate. I’ve never seen a cat eat vegetables before. We can’t have a cat because I’m so allergic, but if this is a hungry, homeless cat, I don’t mind feeding it. When it starts to get cold, we’ll have to think of a place to put a warm sleeping box for it, but that’s several months off now.
