Hello Connecticut
Life is beginning to settle down here in South Glastonbury. I spend much of my day in this one corner of the living room, where I have set up my office. There are two windows facing out towards the back yard, which is decorated in various shades of green and brown. Thunderstorms have punctuated just about every day this week, and we have learned to recognize the locals in the parking lots of stores, because they are the ones who make no effort (any more) to use an umbrella in between the car and store during a sudden outburst. The wisdom of this is becoming apparent, as the storms are so short that by the time you leave the store, the rain has past, and all that the umbrella does is to drip all over the store’s floor making things hazardous for everybody else.
Living things are everywhere. The only purpose of wire-mesh screens, it appears, is to filter out only the very largest of the insects of every stripe and leg-count which amble their way through our house. The ants, in particular, can be very large (right). Their saving grace is that they all appear to be “scouts” who travel alone. Quite honestly, these ants do not seem to be trying very hard. We found completely open boxes of sugar in the cupboard when we arrived here — which in Los Angeles would have been swarmed by a line of ants within hours — but not a single ant was near. It could be that there are simply so many things to eat outside (e.g. an entire farm’s worth of blueberries) that these ants are all spoiled, and have lost the teamwork spirit that drives their southwest cousins to march in lock step. Mostly poet-ants, then, who have all gone off to the woods to find themselves. They could also be rebellious protest-ants, but they don’t look very religious…
The ten-o-clock rabbit was a bit late this morning, passing under the picnic table around 10:15am by my watch (EDT). He does the rounds, chews on a few flowers, and then moves on. There are strawberries and blueberries right next door, so my guess is that it just comes through here for the roughage.
In the afternoon we went shopping for food, making a point to stop at the local farmstands which dot the countryside. Got some corn, tomatoes (as sweet as plums), and some squash, under the watchful eye of the proprietor’s black kitten, to whom everything seemed surprising.