Thyme flies

It's been almost two months since my last post. In the meantime, I taught two summer classes and kept busy with gardening, raising chickens, late spring cleaning, reading, and all the things I love to do in the summertime.

So here are some highlights. The title of this post comes from a very strange occurrence in the garden. We have grown a variety of herbs this summer, including a very nice thyme plant that was growing slowly but steadily. Then one day we noticed that it had simply vanished. There were no signs of disturbance, no tracks around it to indicate a hungry critter, no stubs of stems or leaves--absolutely no evidence to show that it had ever been there. Now that has to be a metaphor for the swift speed with which this beautiful summer has passed. It simply flew away.

Speaking of mysteries, there was also the mystery of our one-eyed tree. We have a big, gorgeous maple in the backyard on which we put a sculpted face. To be honest, it creeps some people out, but it reminds me of the trees in The Wizard of Oz. (Come to think of it, those trees were pretty creepy, too.) Early in the summer, the tree lost its right eye. I found it broken at the foot of the tree and glued it back together and put it back. A week or two later, the tree lost the pupil of its left eye, and this time there was no trace of it anywhere. This is especially odd because I was sitting outside at the time and saw it fall. We combed through the grass all around the tree, but no eyeball. So we glued a toonie (that's a Canadian $2 coin) in its place, but I'm pretty sure the tree has no sight in its left eye.

I have no idea what the metaphor in that might be.

Then there was the disappearance of our last brown hen. In late June, she vanished for several days, and after a while, we thought the worst. She was old, after all, and there are a lot of predators in the woods that surround us here. But on the third day, she returned ravenous with hunger and thirst. Then she left again. Just when we gave up on her for the second time, she reappeared, gobbled up food and water, and took off again to parts unknown. This went on for several weeks.

Then one Sunday morning I was out enjoying the sun when I noticed a lot of color and bustle in some ground cover. There was the brown hen with a flock of 11 newly hatched chicks. Now we had already hatched 10 chicks in the incubator, and that was a few more than we really wanted. (We put in extra eggs because we didn't believe they would all hatch.) Suddenly we had 21 chicks. Good thing they are so cute when they first hatch!

The lesson there is never to count your chickens before they're hatched, I guess.

Life here is full of lessons, some ordinary and some profound. This summer I've learned to make two really excellent kinds of rhubarb pie and some respectable hummus. I learned that saskatoon berries are great for baking, but the jam is absolutely disgusting. I've learned about the four kinds of snakes most common to BC when one appeared in our garden one evening. (That time I was the one who vanished without a trace.) Mostly I learn to love this place more with every passing year.

Reading report: On Canada Day, we celebrate in a nearby town called Salmo that features a parade, a homemade pie sale, and a remarkably good used book sale to support the library. I got a whole stack of mostly light reads this year and worked my way through them on warm afternoons. The last I read was Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. Funny--I knew a few pages into it that I had read it before (probably when it was first published in 2001 because I read everything she writes), but I remembered so little that it was like reading it for the first time again. Now I'm reading a really interesting and edgy novel called American Gods by Neil Gaiman. It's all magical realism all the time, and yes, I recommend it . . . so far.