It's a jungle out there

I mean here. One picture this time is of the furry friends who have visited. Sunday morning, a bear.  I've seen evidence of bear in our yard – scat and footprints and overturned compost buckets. But never an actual bear. He/she ambled right in front of our screened in porch and went over to the arborvitae trees to scratch his/her back and paw at the branches. No wonder these trees are not doing so well. Anyway, kitty and I were watching from the porch before I whistled, but that had no effect. The bear was on its own schedule before heading down the hill. I am wondering if it was the same bear that Mary encountered at Pittsfield State Forest a few days earlier. Her new nickname is the "bear whisperer."

Then, this morning I looked out the window and saw our family of three deer. I ran out to hush them away, when I saw a fawn that couldn't have been more than a day of two old. So little, he/she couldn't even follow mama deer into the woods because the grass was too high. The fawn went up to our stone wall and just laid down on the mulch with the mother watching from the woods. The mother took off. A few hours later, the fawn was gone.

I won't even talk about the dead baby groundhog Mary found the other day, but rather focus on the crashing noise we heard when eating dinner on the porch. I thought it was a Russian drone screaming through the woods. No, it was a huge tree that fell up the slope to our old front porch. 

All in all, it looks like we humanoids are just temporary inhabitants while a world of nature is swirling around us. Hence the nature trail cam I put up on the path behind our house. We'll pass along any interesting photos from that. So far nothing, or I haven't quite figured out how to work it yet.

On the humanoid front, we had celebrations. John/Joao proudly raised his three fingers over and over again on his birthday.  Looked like he might have had too much birthday as he was in the emergency room a few days later. And Matthew celebrated his birthday, which means Peter and Janet marked another anniversary, as well as a 50^th college reunion. Hopefully no emergency rooms connected with those big events.

On the travel scene, Margaret and Andrew returned home from their trip to Germany and Austria.  Simon recovered from his lingering cold/flu, but Margaret picked up strep from her generous son.  They got together at a vineyard with Jeff and Melodie over the weekend.

Joe went back to Brazil for Joao's birthday and a getting-to-know-you-again with his family. And Annie and Sankar have been slowly making their way to the east coast, with an eta in Pittsfield on Sunday. 

We saw a photo of Claire running a 10K with a Pomfret baseball cap and a Pomfret shirt on!  And we saw a video of a television news segment of a "tree and historic house scavenger hunt" in Fairport NY, featuring the Newman-Cotter House built in 1872, with a historic tree in front of a wrap-around porch. Do you know who lives there?

Around here, we've been busy getting the gardens ready, and they are in need of rain. Mary went to a swim meet in Middletown Connecticut, and we've both been teaching Afghan refugees, in Mary's case, swimming, and for me, English, and various other adaptations to life in the USA. After one session in the library, the young man stood up and pointedly said that in all of Afghanistan there was nothing like the library we were enjoying….and taking for granted. Incredible.

It's too busy around here. Tours have started back up at Arrowhead, just as classes at the lifelong learning institute ended. But not for long, I'll be teaching classes in June and July, and we'll both be taking a class on Melville's short stories. And yesterday, we drove to Boston for a baseball game, and drove all the way home last night.  Don't ask why.

On that note, let's hit the pause button and wish you all a happy June. Summer is back!

Love from up here.