Longest Day of the Year

Midsummer's Night - should be frolicking around in the oak forest at the back of the vineyard by rights. Instead I am suffering the worst seasonal allergy day of the year, drippy nose, red eyes, not nearly romantic a picture to warrant a romp through wooded hills by moonlight.

And besides, it truly has been the longest day of the year. Started off with sore, swollen fingers from attempting to strip paint off the chipped concrete stoop at the front of the house while the Italian Husband played golf this Father's Day.

Amongst a myriad of professional duties, a noisy, testosterone-packed houseful of school and college-sojourned sons and the looming half-baked paint-stripping exercise, a reptile crisis of epic proportions reached a tragic finale by early afternoon.

I'd attempted to conjure up my inner zoologist with a salt water bath and the help of a pair of tweezers when my youngest, nature-loving son's three-year-old, sole surviving gargoyle gecko struggled to shed her seasonal skin. Discovering some sort of awful bloody lizard prolapse, my usual reserve towards pragmatic in-home care of everyday disorders of both animals and people went the way of the soft-hearted ma with an emergency trip to a reptile specialist the boy was frantic to see.

With less than a 50/50 chance that Alfreda the great would make it through surgery (several other issues to contend with along with the dreadful derriere), the boy made his own executive decision to spare her the obvious discomfort and save his college fund a $400 hit.

Departed with a brown paper box with Alfreda put out of her misery for an at-home backyard burial next to her previously departed partner Little G.

Later this evening, around dusk, a hummingbird hovered over the grave, marked with a straw-tied, makeshift wooden-stick cross.

"Hummingbirds are the keepers of souls," said the boy, who had read this somewhere. It seemed to help to think of Alfreda crawling around the hillside of eternity under the light of a midsummer's moon.

The porch project awaits my return. Maybe in the cool of an early midsummer morning. Tomorrow's always another day.

Comments

[Lindsey]

Poor Dom. Hope he's okay. And like you, currently experiencing the worst hayfever so far and frustratingly I can't take anything for it. Total sympathy (or empathy) for you x

[lara.knutson@gmail.com]

I think we could all use a nice tea time...

[Frances]

tea -yes, absolutely Lara, let's get our calendars together and we can have a good old fashioned scone cook'off!