Mrs. Teabody Seizes Summer

Sweet days of summer, the jasmine's in bloom

July is dressed up and playing her tune

 ~ Seals and Croft 1972

Good Morning, Gentle Reader. Did you wake with a summer breeze  dancing quietly to birdsong this morning? No suffocating, maddening heat. No trepidation about how to endure another sultry day. What a rare and wonderful seventeenth day of July! What a rare and wonderful summer!

A typical conversation starter  these halcyon days is "How is your summer?" and Mrs. Teabody always hears such wonderful remarks, all with a common theme: summer of 2014 is one of the loveliest summers in memory. Look around you. There is green glory everywhere. The trees are puffed and laden with shade. Lawns that often turn to tan and brown look as lush as they did at first cutting. Amid all that green is a primer on the color spectrum. Porch boxes, borders, hanging baskets spill trailing petunias and callie in paintbox colors,  lime and purple sweet potato vines cascade onto porches and sidewalks, canna lilies shoot skywards, their scarlet tongues just now beginning to show. Every few days a storm blows through to provide ample rain so that all plants not only survive but thrive. That same effect has found its way into the psyches of people.

A few days ago around seven in the morning Mrs. Teabody had her smug little summer temporarily compromised when she saw a medium-sized bear strolling  the same path Mrs. Teabody had strolled just half an hour before. Being only fractionally larger than  James and Dani Gunnell's two loopy and benign Newfoundlands, this first bear was not really frightening--only cautionary. Some hours later the face of everything Mrs. Teabody loves about living inside a forest changed in mid afternoon (!) when  an altogether different bear appeared. While this bear was not so large as a cow nor so terrifying as a television shark, he was HUGE compared to the earlier bear. 'twould be an exaggeration, not to mention doggerel, to say the house shook with each step he took, but there was plenty about this second bear to give one pause . . . his paws for example. After this fur-covered behemoth launched his massive self into the darkness of the woods, Mrs. Teabody  had to shake herself into full awareness. She had just experienced a two-bear day. What horrors lay ahead? What would the forest yield next? If there had been two bears, couldn't there reasonably be three? Or worse -- hundreds?

Mrs. Teabody is both blessed and cursed by a lively imagination. Fortunately having lived life for nearly seven decades, she also has a modicum of common sense to counter her ridiculous imaginings, to place even a two-bear day into the context of  likelihood and deciding that one cannot live life waiting for a bear to step out of the woods. That sort of fear, that way of thinking keeps one bound in a nutshell, cut off from everything that life is about: the planned balanced beautifully by the happenstance.

Last summer the neighbor's little doggy barked on and on in a flourish of excitement at the base of a tree next to the Teabodys' deck. "He has something up the tree," said Mr. Teabody. "It's probably a raccoon." The Teabodys then saw an incredible sight. Clinging to the tree trunk twenty feet in the air with every ounce of furry strength was a GROUNDhog, the one pictured above. "That's not possible, is it?" asked Mrs. Teabody. "Well, clearly it IS possible," answered Mr. Teabody, "but I suspect it is rare."

This is  a unique July, Gentle Reader. Waking up to this kind of glorious weather on my baby brother's birthday rarely happens. A green July rarely happens. When it does, you must embrace it and seize it and make every minute count. And those bears? Just passin' through.