Fireflies
Fireflies start to light up around sunset. At first, they dart around near the ground. As the dusk deepens, they proceed up into he trees.
They don’t mind lawns, but if you use pesticides they will not come to your yard.
I sit on my porch in Greenwich each night to see this spectacle. For me, few entertainments are as fine.
Why do fireflies flicker? It’s a mating dance. As is only right, on a fine summer evening.
Tonight, I went out around 8 o’clock for my nightly transfix. Eventually, a train whistle told me that I had spent an hour on the porch as the fireflies danced and the spiky purple delphiniums grew ever more dark and mysterious.
When I moved from Los Angeles to Princeton in 1994, I took a walk one evening along a brook. I saw fireflies dancing, and knew I was in love with the Northeast.
The nature-starved of Manhattan gather on July nights in Central Park and Battery Park to watch the fireflies light up on lawns and under trees.
July
I planted peas, lettuce, arugula, yellow and green string beans, eggplant, cucumbers, zucchini, peppers, and tomatoes, along with herbs.
Paired with beans from Rancho Gordo, broth from Brodo, and cans of fish with an occasional steak or rib blowout, my vegetable harvests have been feeding me well.
Friends! Eat Your Lawn.
Dead Rabbit
In Manhattan, a legendary bar called the Dead Rabbit serves tasty cocktails, delicious vittles, and fine blues.
In Greenwich, we have no historic bars. But we have had a little run of actual dead rabbits. It’s rumored that one of our neighbors is using a deadly pesticide. One of the dead rabbits ended up in my yard.
At first, I praised my cat up and down as a rabbit slayer. After all, the rabbits eat everything good in the garden. The corpse had appeared under a Japanese maple, near a catnip bush where my cat likes to shelter from the 90 degree July heat.
But when I shoveled the poor little bunny corpse into a bag, I saw no signs of struggle, no blood, no wounds. My cat, while visibly pleased, is not likely to have done the deadly deed.
My question is, how can one approach the subject with neighbors of diverse gardening cultures? The newer houses are strictly of the Mars-landing-pad landscape persuasion, with severe straight rows of arbor vitae that serve no purpose other than privacy.
Some of the older houses are of the “let a thousand weeds grow” persuasion.
Others have the Mosquito Joe flag planted in their gardens.
My faithful readers will no doubt recall my confrontation with the trellis-throwing, border-disputing virago on my western border.
Clearly, this is not a neighborhood for friendly discussion about horticultural methods. And I am merely a renter, which subtracts my cred points to below zero in the suburban milieu.
But I am really, truly, pissed off about the rabbit in my garden, and somebody should speak up.
Renters and Land Rights
I beg a dispensation from my libertarian readers for discussing the injustice of treating renters as without any property rights.
I understand perfectly well that many renters are slovenly wretches and ingrates who blithely run properties into the ground.
But what of the hardship cases who plant gardens, improve properties, and build businesses, only to fall prey to an owner’s determination to seek more profit by destroying all of that work?
You know. A bigger house. A luxury spa. Whatever.
It isn’t right, my friends. I don’t know how I would change it, but it’s got to change.
I have no mechanical knowledge of the incentives. I just know it isn’t right.
Your indefatigable correspondent,
Laurel Kenner