Not-so-Doggish Days of August

Until our departure August 11 the summer of 2011 was so miserable we hadn’t used the old swimmin’ hole at all, not even once. This year’s version of the blithe season couldn’t be more different. We swim virtually every day, sometimes twice. Our nightime dips with bioluminescent diatoms have been especially gratifying: the galaxy brilliant in the moonless sky, another galaxy stirred to life by our motion in the water. How do the invisible one-celled geniuses do it? I have no idea. Fill a glass with seawater and you see nothing at all, but at the shore, in the dark, the water comes alive with transitory lights. It is enough to fill even the most jaded old heart with something like wonder.

Bananagrams bellicosity continues. These days we like to play a four-way sprint with Lynn and Louise requiring each player to lay down 36 tiles as fast as possible while deploying at least one 11-letter word. I know lots of two-dollar words of that length – some even usable in polite company – so at last I have a battlefield in which I can hope to compete with assassin Lynn. Oh what fun.

Carole and Garth graced us with a visit to Bigadore. Agreeably rhapsodic about the physical beauty around us, our friends were also generous in their compliments about the country carpentry manifest in the cabin itself. As reported in the previous issue of Peregrinations Garth inspired a domestic renovation:

a new screen window in the forty-year-old outhouse. Pretty pleased with the outcome even without Garth’s blessing, I was all the more gratified by my pal’s enthused seal of approval. We sat in the porch, talked baseball, drank beer, reveled in Jan’s seafood chowder, agreed that life is pretty good even as we drift into senescence. A no-holds-barred funfest in a certain porch produced the inevitable result: two more Bob Nagel fans. In good conscience I couldn’t allow the visit to be too perfect: I exacted a small measure of revenge for the posthole-digging labours Garth dragooned me into providing during our June stopover at Amherst Shore: I put him to work helping fall and remove a tall poplar that had worn out its welcome by the cabin. Now, alas, our pals are departed for further adventures in Newfoundland; the cabin is quieter and less jolly than it was.

Nature affords its plenty. Blueberries flourished below the cabin in a fashion unseen in years. Up the way, closer to our boundary with Old Route 5, the blackberries are still prolific and super-sweet. Jan makes the most of the abundance of tasty chanterelle mushrooms growing in the shade of the spruce and fir. The branches of summer apples droop under the weight of a heavy crop, dropping their bounty on our road.

Meanwhile, along where the perimeter trail meets our little interior bog we see coyote scat and the footprints of deer and bobcat. What nocturnal adventures transpire in the woods behind the cabin as we lay snoring in our bed? I’ve heard good things about Lee Valley Tools’ motion-activated ‘critter camera’. Maybe I’ll get me one.