Arson and Hot-ittude

The baby robins on the front porch spent yesterday panting...their little beaks gaping as if they were seeking a handout...or should I say a beak out..from the folks. The nest is shaded by big cedars and small lilac bushes and tucked well under the eaves of the porch, but there was no escaping the hothothot. This morning the birds are going crazy getting their chores done before it really gets warm, hummers at the bottle, the gold finch that is picking spider webs off all the windows to make a nest, swinging from the hanger it dangles from right at the same time, robins crisscrossing the porch with tiny insects to stuff in those red and yellow beaks.

We lost an older hen to the heat, even though I propped the hen house roof open with bricks and cooled her off with water. Just too much stress for the poor old thing I guess.... Had to move Scooter to a place right in a shaded door way so he could catch what breeze there is. He is so small and it appears that his temperature-controlling mechanisms have not caught up yet. He was happy by the door anyhow and danced around like a little sprite.

All we can do is make everything as comfortable as we can and wait for the heat wave to end...oh, and continue doing everything else we normally do. The crops aren't going to wait for cool weather so the haying must go on. Yesterday was a nightmare of flat tires for the guys. Bad enough to chop all day, but changing tires in such heat is a misery. They did it anyhow.

Meanwhile boredom is being blamed for the alleged arson, which took out the building where my parents used to have their stores. Boredom! We have rules about boredom here...do not mention the word lest some evil parent find you a job to alleviate your problem. No one gets bored here.....(Maybe if somebody gave those three little alleged firebugs some farm work to do and they wouldn't have either the time or the energy to whine about being bored, let alone use a path of destruction to keep it at bay...poor babies.)

My folks were as bothered about the fire as I was...it wasn't our building or anything, but so many memories roosted there. I couldn't drive by without thinking.....

I was seven or eight when the folks opened the shop there and an adult and out on my own when they closed the antique store and moved the book shop to Johnstown. I think back on sitting on the steps with my brothers, sticky and orange with Popsicle juice, pretending to be pioneers in the horse-drawn sleighs the folks used for window dressing, antique lap robes and all...going out back in the wood-working and refinishing part of the shop, where dad and mom worked over the furniture they restored, to beg some scraps and nails to build boats to float in the creek that runs under where the library is now. My brother's boats were always worlds better than mine...his engineering talent showed up early. I did learn how hard it is to drive a nail into hardwood though and to pass up that pretty cherry for pine every time though. I drove the mud puppies and salamanders in that tiny creek crazy trying to catch them without much success, but they were always there to tantalize me to another trek down there...and the minnows, darting silver flashing in the murky, shallow water. I couldn't' catch them either.

During those hard young years we were always changing houses and moving here or there, but the shop was a sort of center of everything in our lives. The folks were open seven days a week and we kids were always there, underfoot but kept close. We learned to watch for shop lifting and to treat customers with courtesy. Got paid commission on our sales (oh, the Popsicles ten percent would buy).

I feel an odd resentment toward those poor allegedly bored little alleged arsonists even though all they killed was a long-empty shell. Maybe I shouldn't but I do.