Lingering

Summer is lingering. It has been somewhat like high summer in Iowa here in Texas these last few days. The ground is drying out, even cracking in places. All of the weeds and prairie grasses are towering over my head. It is humid, warm, even hot in the middle of the day, and there's a drowsy buzzing that accompanies the sunset each night. The frogs start up their chorus and the fireflies flicker above all the greenness into the night. Now, I should mention that Texas doesn't really get fireflies. It's a new phenomenon, what with all the rain. It has warmed up a little again, and the humidity shrouds the rolling hills and leafy green trees each morning in a thick blanket of cottony fog. It gives the illusion that our house is an island, a secret Avalon, each morning as I walk Charley and his lunch cooler out to his truck to kiss him goodbye for the day. As he dissapears down the lane, I sometime imagine he's gone to the land of the humans!
I came home in the daylight today, a rare treat. I cooked a huge homey meal and we had John, our tenant, over for dinner. The guys were most excited about the warm fluffy biscuits, and I was most happy with the salad topped with a florette of cucumber and a crisp red pepper strip. Before they got home, while the potatoes were roasting, I walked around a little bit. My volunteer garden has gone kaput. There have been some really spectacular spider webs,by one Banana Spider I spotted, and some other plump, 25-cent-piece-sized arachnid, that have been put up in corners and across neglected paths. The Agalinis and the Parralena are still blooming, although the Agalinis is drooping. There are often little tiny sulfer butterflies at the base of the weeds. There is a 20% chance of rain tomorrow, and Autumn usually brings to us another rainy season. Who knows what it will bring us this year - it may continue to be unusual in weather patterns as the rain was to the height of summer.
We're headed to Connecticut on Friday, and I'm going to enjoy the 75 degree weather, although it is hard imagine right now what it will feel like to wear long sleeves. But if it is chilly, and I do get to wear long sleeves, you can bet I'll linger a bit longer than the others, outside in the Northeastern evening.

Lately

Summer has come, and is slipping away already. I've been explaining that we've had a wet year, and while it can provide some inconvenience, it really has been a boon to us Central Texans. August was lush. Usually August is a dreary brown, similar to the blankness of February up north, but not this year! We have had more than plenty of water, and I have spent many weekends paddling a small boat down glorious stretches of hill country rivers: The Pedernales, The Blanco, Onion Creek, and the highlight - The Frio River. The Frio is a special place - ask anyone who's been there. But I should mention that almost every trip had a pretty high light of it's own. The Pedernales was swift, unobstructed, fell over countless ledges for a bit of a technical challenge - and was 36 inches deep, most of the time! If you fell out, you just stood up and got back in. Onion Creek had a beautiful hydro-massaging waterfall, and we had one exciting time pulling a friend's kayak, wrapped like a tortilla around a rock, off and out of the water, and with a foot kicked it back into shape to carry on. The Blanco trip was a treat, beginning with special access to a put-in that included on the same ranch one of the most spectacular features found on a texas river. The Narrows pours the Blanco river down a slot less than a kayak's width across, down 20 feet, into a churning, frothy, scalloped series of drops that ends in a bit of an overhung canyon and smooths out around a bend to push you on towards the rest. The Frio is crystal clear, emerald green, cold, quite shallow and pushy with incredibly deep swimming hole decorated with playground-perfect boulders for sunning and leaping from. Cypress trees with spanish moss usher you through narrow channels packed with standing waves and lots of action to scoot you on past towering pale limestone cliffs running with springs and festooned with bobbing ferns.
Flowers have bloomed all year long on our land. Right now there are Prairie Agalinis in patches about knee high all over the property. They remind me of foxglove, but are more delicate with spindly stems and leaves. The Bindweed is flowering a brilliant purple on every fence you see, and even in clumps and as a ground covering vine. Broomy Parralena covers the fields with technicolor yellow, and the big ugly mean mystery plant turns out to be some kind of prairie goldenrod, and is blooming right now, too. I saw some old man's beard near the Frio, and there was even one small, stunted texas paintbrush growing in the soggy shaded areas to the back of the property!! The don't usually bloom this late in the year. The vervain is also making an appearance again, something I usually associate with spring. I never did see as much wild geranium as I did last summer, but that may have had to do with how often we've been mowing and where we've developed walk ways and parking with the expansion of the house. Just last night I disturbed three toads walking between houses, one of them at least as big as my fist. I have seen numerous dragonflies and damsel flies, some of them as long as my outstretched hand with bodies as long and as fat as my finger. After the walking sticks and banana spiders disappeared earlier this season, praying mantis have been all over the screens enjoying the bounty our outside light provides them. On our river cruises I've seen Queen butterflies, swollowtails, sisters, hairstreaks, and lots of sulfurs. All of these except the sister made an appearance at the house recently, too.
I've been spending time with Charley and have been doing some embroidery, one of those hobbies I haven't touched in years. I"ve jumped in full-bore and it is a very pleasing way to pass the time. We have added a very big antique buffet to the furnishing of the house, with carved dragons and halfshelves and the original mirror above a set of 4 drawers. The piece is american, and from the early 1900's. We got a smoking deal, and even better, when we moved the 6'tx3.5w'x2'd monster into the house, we rearranged (but didn't remove anything) and wound up with a more open setting that provided us with more space!
So life is good and we've been busy. Fall is going to speed on by, and we have lots of plans. We'll be in Mexico, Connecticut, west Texas, and the south Texas shore by Christmas. There are caves to explore, family to be with, and friends to visit. NOt to mention work to do and a house to finish.... but I don't want to get ahead of myself. I'm very much enjoying this time of year. Tonight I walked the grounds for the first time in a long time, and a downright chilly breeze wrapped me in coolness. There's a dryness that we haven't been able to experience in a while that has settled in for a day or two - we're expecting some more rain this week. The light isn't as long into the night and there is something about the terrain that says Autumn is on the way, and if she doesn't get a speeding ticket on the way, she'll be here sooner than you'll know!

Notta Mucho

There isn't much to report... it is raining, a lot. Yesterday, all day today, probably tomorrow. It was probably all of 75 degrees today. That's quite unusual for a July in Texas! ONce we get a rain gage, my rain reports can be more interesting. I can tell you that when I checked the radar today, the storm stretched from Kerrville (3 hours drive to the west) to the gulf.
The ground is soggy and puddle laden. I have D & O for the weekend, so we should be able to get into all kinds of fun, with all the puddles around. I showed them the spiders and they totally want to feed them grasshoppers tomorrow. In the meantime, I might start to consider blueprints of an arc...

Spider Mentoring Program

I found three more Banana Spiders today. And a walking branch - it must have been a female. She had the pinched look to the end part of her abdomen, with some poop hanging out. She looked really fat, possibly gravid. I wonder if they lay the eggs? Dunno. I say she looked gravid because when I saw some walking sticks mating recently, the male had the female in these clamps in the back... it looked uncomfortable. The female I saw today had a crimp in that same place, like the female had that was being clamped, although now I have to admit that I don't know if they are shaped like that to begin with, or get that way in the clamping. hunh. But back to the spiders...
I went to visit the big banana spider on the eaves of the back of the house. I noticed a very tiny replica on a web about two feet away, on the wall Now the big daddy on the eaves is about the size of a pecan in the shell in the body. Overall diameter is about 5 inches. Junior, in the background, is about two inches diameter, and the body the size of a black-eyed pea. They looked like buddies, but who can tell. While I was standing back there, I turned my gaze to the over-grown acre up front, now filled with blue day lilies hanging out very close to the ground, and the green mystery plant that has taken over. I think it is a milkweed, I wonder if it will flower? It looks like milkweed now, and is about 6 or 6.5 feet tall at this point - about two meters. I was staring at it, trying to figure it out, and my eyes caught a huge web, as big as a framed 8"x10" piece of art, hung off the mesquite and the milkweed. In the center is another gigantic banana spider, resting on her fuzzy hammock. Just below her, my searching eyes found a partner, a little bit smaller, a little bit closer to the ground, on a 5"x8" in a mat. I became conviced we have high participation in the Spider Mentoring Program in our yard.

Twisted Country Fun - Big Spiders & Little Snakes

I mentioned we've been seeing turtles. Charley even stops the car to rescue them when we see them on the road. We've been seeing snakes, too, but the snakes are always smooshed flat and mangled if they are on the road. I've seen him handle his favorite snake, a harmless hognose gone limp, one we found out around the nose cone buildings last fall. Recently, I was talking on the phone and pacing around outside. I was hoping it would fill in for my usual tour of the grounds, but I found myself walking up and down the lane. On my second lap, I walked up farther, closer to the main road than the last. There, on the ground in the middle of one of the tire tracks on our lane, lay a broken and jointed looking snake. Snakes are usually smooth, with lots of curves. But this one lay with its tounge lolling out of its mouth, in angles. It had been run over to be looking like that. Except! It could be one of the tricks the hognose snake plays - opossum, being one of them. The others include hissing and flattening its head like a viper, and even sometimes shaking its tail and hissing to masquerade as a rattler. I watched it for a while, still absorbed in my conversation. It didn't look like the hognose I've seen, and besides, I've seen them go limp, but I've never seen one portray brokeness, for goodness sake. Only the roll of a big tire could have done that to the poor little thing. I was still having this conversation, but now I was really distracted. I wanted to get the dead snake and save it for my husband! He would like that. (weirdo) He could tell me what it is, and we might even skin it. That would be cool. But ew! I don't actually really want to touch it. I've seen a recently extinguished snake before - they still move in reaction to heat and touch stimuli, even without a head and skin on the meat. Ew. I didn't want to touch it because it might move, and then I would have an involuntary freakout and feel stupid. So I picked a stick. Well, I was looking for a stick, but the light was fading and I had to hurry, so I just broke off a dry weed, about 8 inches of dry weed to poke it with. Poke it? Well yes. I was pretty sure it was dead, but just in case, I was going to poke it. I'm faking attention to my conversation now. Remember? I'm still on the phone. And I'm moving in on the snake, reaching my - oh really probably too short, I realize, to keep me safe from anything, but I keep poking that stiff weed out towards it. .. poke. POKE! Scream! Kara jumps. Snake jumps. Hissssss! Slither! Scream! Pant. "Sorry for screaming in your year, Mom. " And I might have explained, but I remember at least thinking " yeah, I poked a dead snake. It wasn't dead. I guess that was a hognose. " It was kind of a weird situation to explain all the sudden. It was outta there, never to be seen again. I was left tasting the metallic tang of adrenaline that I hate to love so much. Yesterday, I spotted a Banana Spider hanging out on its web, attached to the roof and wall at the back of the house, by the laundry line and the rock pile. Banana Spiders are HUGE spiders, and weave a gossamer web with a thick, cottony zig-zag up the center, where they usually rest. I admired its race-car coloring, jags of hornet yellow and pure ebony all over the shiny carapace and smooth, jointed legs. Tonight, I spied a wild-eyed, stripey-legged large and juicy hopper - one of the damned grasshoppers that has been denuding the fig tree, and felling the mandevilla flowers within moments of bloom. I wondered aloud to Charley what would happen if we grabbed it, and tossed it into the Banana Spider web. He thought it would hop a lot, and ruin the web. We decided it was worth some action, and spiders repair webs all the time... that's the point. Just to be kind, Charley yanked the legs off the poor prickley hopper, and tossed 'er in. MAN. It wasn't 5 seconds and the big lady had her wrapped in one translucent layer of silk. Wide sheets appeared, and the spider rolled her bundle. The next pass made the packet opaque, and the spider crunched down to deliver some uh... anesthetic. We both stood there with our mouths open, and then our conversation was something like "that was fast did you see that?" "Yeah, oh my god that was fast holy cow!" That spider made quick, tidy work of that poor handicapped grasshopper. I felt a little guilty, almost, for greedily handing out an advantage. The spider didn't even have to fix her web, and she left her little package to liquify, and resumed her place on the soft pad of cottony zig zag, the throne in the middle of her impenetrable fortress.