Summer in the City

I have discovered the best thing to do on the first rainy day of summer: go to the park.

 

Now, this may seem counter-intuitive, but let me explain.  Mice live in the park, Field mice that love to burrow.  Mice reproduce every twenty-one days.  They are sexually mature at 4-7 weeks. Two mice will make up to 50 new mice during a three month period.  If the timing is right, and the rain comes mid-summer, just as the burrows are brim-full of runoff, the park grass will team with what I like to refer to as a torrent of leaping and squealing “rodentia minutia”.

 

Easy pickings for a small dog bred for going to ground, as it were.

 

People tend to whine in the summer rain.  I dine.

 

It’s all in the way you see things, no?

 

Chow.

 

Thistles and Bees

Hyde Park is glorious in the summer.  Long grass and thicket abound, begging to be trailed and explored.  And I am the dog to do it.

But the British squirrel is as stoic as Churchill, with a schizophrenic look in its eyes.  It sits upon the lowest branch of a tree in temptation, just high enough to foil me, just high enough to vex.

Sometimes I sit motionless, intending to be a piece of errant statuary, misplaced by a bemused tender of the yard, but just as Churchill was too smart for Hitler, the squirrel knows my game.  I move on.

Behind a well-kept row of roses, over a small berm, there is an orchard of thistles in full bloom.  They smell like honey and clover.  I have learned that if the blossom is tender and one nibbles carefully, it will come clean away from the thorn.  It is lovely to eat, even for a small dog.  It has no ill effect beyond tempting my tongue for more.  But there is something missing.  The air is still and clear.

No bees.

No bees to chase and snap up along the way.  The park is full of blooms, open and fragrant…and without a single bee.  I worry.

Even a small dog knows that the world was built from the ground up.  Everything in between exists for the next along the way.  Like taking a step out of the stairway to heaven, without that one step there may be no where to go but back down.

Where are the bees?

Chow.