Explosions

We were traveling for eight days last week, and when we came home, everything in our yard had exploded. In the big scheme of things, eight days seems insignificant, but at the end of August, nature gets into high gear. The days are getting shorter, and there is still so much work to be done.

In our absence, one of our sunflowers added over a foot in height. It towers over everything in our backyard like a skyscraper in a low rise community. When this giant blooms, the flower should be as big as a dinner plate.

Our little bluestem grass isn’t little anymore, either. I won’t be wandering through it as before. Now it resembles a sea of jade green waves. However, there is a swath of toppled grass running through the middle. We surmise the deer made this path on a nocturnal run.

When I went to open our lakeside door, about a dozen spiders started raining down. In fact, the arachnids had decorated our entire house when we were gone. Since we like a clear view from our windows, I hooked together eight vacuum clearer tubes, put a brush on the top and dusted off the entire house. The Charlottes started the redecoration work the moment I finished.

In our absence, the annual monarch migration to Mexico had clearly begun. From dawn to dusk, clusters of huge monarchs are fluttering everywhere and sipping up nectar to sustain themselves on the long journey. Their numbers have gone down drastically in recent years, but this is not apparent in our yard at the moment.

On top of all this flight action, we had a dragonfly hatch. It appears as if hundreds of tiny helicopters are zooming around the yard. The bug population definitely will take a hit.

All this frantic growth and activity is, of course, a prelude to the quiet seasons ahead. It’s also a reminder to us to make the most of these waning days of summer.

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