High Summer

Hummingbird at feeder

Baby hummingbird on nest

  In  high summer life feels full and rich.  We celebrate at barbecues  and garden parties and at our cul-de-sac's annual 4th of July fireworks extravaganza. This year, it is also time for hummers and gummers.  Judy installed a hummingbird feeder just beyond our deck.  The hummers found it almost immediately, and Judy began reporting on the territorial struggles around it.  First one hummer prevailed over the others, then all of them chased away the bees that had discovered the sugar water.

Mutt Leigh's bliss face

     Next door, Janet and Robert discovered a hummingbird nest in one of  their outdoor chandeliers.The mother bird sat on the nest just outside the back door, with humans  talking and eating  just a few feet below her.  Robert found an angled mirror, like a dental mirror only larger, and stood with it on a ladder.  That allowed us to see into the nest.  The eggs looked like two white jelly beans.  After three weeks, we are  seeing the fledgelings at our feeder.

Lucy before the shower: Bridget's photo

     Mutt Leigh, our resident gummer, is having no trouble eating despite  missing five teeth. We have learned how to scratch her head and back so she gets her bliss face on.

Sisters and cousin

    It is hard to leave Oregon in high summer, but  Judy and Rose persuaded me to join the rest of my sisters at the beach in Delaware   There was a wedding shower planned for my niece Abby, who will be married in November.  I was stumped about what to give her for a present.  She's had her own household for years.  Her mother, my sister Florrie, asked, "Do you have anything of Mom's?  Abby was so close to Mom."  I remembered that Abby likes to bake.  I emptied the two glass jars that I have used to hold flour and sugar for the last 46 years.  My mother had used them before me.  I cleaned up the old jars and shipped them east, to the tune of $43. I enclosed a note that said, "My mother used these jars for flour and sugar.  May her spirit be with you whenever you bake."

Hit or green stamps?

Abby opens presents

Auntie Ellen 1968

    Oh, brother, I fretted to my sisters, what a present!  It will either be a hit, or it will be a green stamp moment.  Back in the sixties, when there was a wedding shower for me, my Auntie Ellen gave me her collection of S&H green stamps.  I even had to lick them and put them in the book.  Auntie Ellen was a teacher when I was little and my mother was put on bed rest. Auntie Ellen took me to school with her.  When my first child was born and I needed help in my house of stairs, Auntie Ellen and my mother stayed with me. I can't remember what I used the S&H green stamps for,  but I know they helped my tight newlywed  budget.

    At the shower, I marveled at Abby's friends.  "Did we ever look like that?"  I asked Rose.  "Nah.  they are more put together," she replied.  Little Lucy hovered, squirming with anticipation, as she handed Abby her gifts to open. Abby followed the family tradition of reading cards aloud.  ( That tradition has prompted us to buy the most sentimental, flowery and wordy cards we could find.)  Abby got tears in her eyes when she opened the jars and read my note.

Auntie Ellen's sampler