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August 26, 1998
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Despite the heat and the nearly unbearable humidity, I can feel summer ending. Some of the maple trees are showing red leaves already. The shorebird migration is in full swing. Every sandwich boy and barista who waits on me talks about going back to school. The days are getting noticeably shorter. The regrets for another summer misspent are piling up: the swims and boat rides not taken, the vacations not even planned... And aren't the greenheads supposed to be dead by now? What's up with that? The cats at the shelter don't seem any different with the changing season, except that Goldie didn't seem to have any interest in sex with towels or blankets today. Good thing too 'cause Bob donated a whole pile of brand new towels in nice matching colors. Roberta likes to make the towels and pillowcases in the cages match. She thinks it helps the cats get adopted. Anything is worth a try. Maine was fixated on escaping today. She stood by the door and tried to slip out whenever somebody entered or left. She actually did make it to the stairwell once but Bob found her there when he went downstairs to get the big bags of kitty litter. She was not happy to be found. Maine has taken a liking to me for some reason. She head butts me and tries to climb on my lap if I sit down for even a minute. When I finished the dishes and litterboxes today I sat down on top of the credenza in the center of the room to pet Jaguar who was on top of one of the floor cages. While I was stroking Jaguar and getting him to purr, Maine crawled into my lap and started purring. Then she stretched out to her full length and rolled over in ecstasy - on my lap! She and I nearly fell off the credenza. Meanwhile, Jaguar let out a plaintive meow when I stopped petting him so I had to pet him with one hand and Maine with the other. Jaguar was acting ecstatic too. He lolled his head over the edge of the basket he was curled up in and rolled his chin toward me. I obliged by stroking his throat and he reciprocated by purring his loudest most contented purr. The washer is broken again and lots of laundry piled up on the floor. Bob took some to a laundromat near where he lives, not the one where you can only wash clean clothes. I felt like I was the slowest litter box washer on earth this morning. I just kept slogging and splashing and feeling like I was never going to be done. This is becoming a theme: I am never going to be finished with all the chores. Somehow I did finish the dishes and the litter boxes and had time to spend with the cats. By the time I left the shelter, my malaise had begun to lift. It was so beastly bloody hot that I felt reluctant to go home, fearing I would just curl up with Pico Iyer's Tropical Classical in front of my air conditioner (former home to starlings who thanks to me have gone out into the world free of feather mites) and waste one of the few remaining summer days. It seemed urgent not to waste it with the possibility of Hurricane Bonnie's paying a visit later in the week. I had my binoculars and bird book in the car so I went over to the refuge. It's only about a 7 minute drive from the shelter if there's no traffic. I pulled over at the salt pannes to check out mass quantities of shorebirds. A group of elderly birders were gathered around somebody with the Mass. Audubon logo on the shirtsleeves but I couldn't tell what they were looking at. In what seemed like a sea of semipalmated sandpipers , I picked out 25 or so semipalmated plovers, a greater yellow legs, and several lesser yellow legs. While I was watching the yellow legs, the elders packed up to leave. One guy who must have been in his 80's or even older, driving a station wagon with Florida plates, pulled up next to me, leaned out the window and said "There's a white-rumped sandpiper in among the semipalmateds. They're a little bigger than the semipalmateds you know and of course they have the white rump. It's hard to see unless the wind blows and ruffles their feathers. Good luck." Unlike my experience with the fork-tailed flycatcher last week, in which I'd been consciously looking for the thing for 2 days, I wasn't looking for anything in particular today until that guy brought up the white-rumped sandpiper. So rather than going further into the refuge and walking on the beach as had been my plan, I started scanning every single semipalmated sandpiper in the salt pannes. There were acres of them. I hummed the Sesame Street tune "one of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn't belong". Suddenly one of the sandpipers took off and flew a few yards further into the marsh, thus displaying its white rump! Once it landed I could see that yes it was a little larger and the beak was more curved and a tad longer... but I never would have given this bird a second look if that guy with the Florida station wagon hadn't told me there was a white-rumped there. There's a lesson in there somewhere for me. Fresh from the white-rumped sandpiper sighting and in clean dry clothes, I brought my copy of Tropical Classical with me to Starbucks as their air conditioning is much more effective than mine - so effective I thought Tom was going to get hypothermia the other day - not mention the coffee is better than mine. It was downright cold in Starbucks, but that made it possible to enjoy hot coffee. Tom showed up when I was about a quarter of the way through my coffee so I joined him. I'd been wanting to show him Pico Iyer's essay about Henry Miller in Tropical Classical, so this was fortuitous. I'd also been jotting down words I needed to look up in the dictionary and Tom happened to have a dictionary - a nice big fat Webster's not one of those dinky paperback pocket ones. He read and I looked up proleptic, kraal, and Monophysite (none of which the spellchecker recognizes btw). I hung out with Tom for well over two hours, reading aloud particularly funny passages from Pico Iyer until it was past suppertime and I felt like I had errands to do and miles to go... |
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