Smelling the Roses

 

Red-bellied Woodpecker

We went out last night to pick up milk for the house. Farm households like ours go through a lot of it, especially during these hot, sticky days, when its refreshing balance of vitamins and minerals is a fantastic thirst-quencher. (Way to go, Dairy Month!)

On the way home, the boss said, "Wanna go up around the loop?"

We haven't been up on the loop (Ingersoll, Argersinger, Borden, and home....lots of ponds and tundra-like fields...home to many awesome birds) much lately. Gas prices have nibbled and gnawed away our ability to travel until even the close places in the Schoharie Crossing park are too far most days.

Black Locust

Anyhow, I agreed and we went. It was hard dusk. We could hear a few daytime birds, sleepy robins, a late catbird or two, but not much else. Certainly too late for shorebirds at the ponds.

However, we both had an instinctive feeling that maybe we should go down Borden Road, so we did. No more than had we made the turn when there he was, sitting proud atop a power pole in all his fierce and predatory glory....a Great-horned Owl...first of the year.

Delightful, especially since we missed an actual, real live, confirmed Red-headed Woodpecker earlier in the day. We have seen photos....now to see the bird....

And about those roses. COVID left me with about 10 percent of my normal ability to smell things. The things I could smell were wrong somehow. Frankly it stank and not in a good way.

However gradually I have become able to smell this or that. Usually bad things, but, hey, better than nothing, right?

Oddly I could smell the honeysuckle this summer, which I never noticed before. However, the lilies of the valley that my cousin gave me last year that remind me so much of Grandma Montgomery? 

A disappointing nope.

I despaired for the riverbank grape flowers, my favorite scent in the world. What were the odds I could smell them this year? Imagine my joy when the first whiff wafted in through the car windows last week. Not as strong as usual, but there.

Thank you Lord! It's the little things

Soon, probably next week or the week after, the wild, invasive, horrible-pest-the-rest-of-the-year wild roses will flaunt their flagrant white wedding veils and swamp the valley with their scent of sweet old ladies' purses*. Will I be aware of the latter? Only time will tell.

Fledgling American Robin

*One of my grandmas must have used rose-scented eau de toilet and kept a fragrant hanky in her purse...grandmas did back then, you know. Anyhow rose time always reminds me of both of them. Those same purses usually contained Chiclets, or some other wonderful, exotic treats, so as to placate whining grandchildren. Ah, the fond memories of it all....sucking the hard sweet coating off the Chiclets, then chewing the concrete-hard nugget of gum inside until your teeth whined worse than you did.

Best bird last week,
although not the best picture
Brant