So this morning Jon pointed to the bedroom floor and said — is that dribbled makeup?  Not unless you’re wearing it, I replied.  Said droplets revealed themselves to be peanut butter.   Which matched the abstract concoction on our duvet.  That in a peanutnut shell is the state of our nation.

When Piper arrived a week ago (It seems longer, much longer, both Theodore and I agree, while reminiscing about the wonderful life we used to have), everything has changed, changed utterly,  as Yeats would put it.    Whether either of us would characterize the new regime having a “terrible beauty” is debatable.

Come to think of it, she IS  both beautiful and terrible.  Dandelion soft fur, gorgeous eyes like locked lasers,  Skye terrier ears beginning to stand up, all good.  But terror squeezes my heart when I have to admit that she may be  smart.  I have made a point of never owning a pet or a machine that is smarter than I am;  sure,  I had to drop the “smart machine” element almost 37 years ago with our first Apple but I pathetically clung to safe harbour of the pet warning.   For example,  I know not to fall in love with a border collie.   But Skyes almost always anchor the bottom end of the canine IQ list.  We count on this, and Theodore has never disappointed us. 

Piper’s first night was a busy one, pulling out all the stops in an impressive repertoire  of yodels, coyote yips (in which she played all the parts in the opera), and a growly mumble which reminded me of Bijou, our macaw, when she was learning to talk.  Luckily, the delightful breeder modelled the appropriate response:  “SHUSH!!!  MAMA NEEDS HER SLEEP!” I can’t do the Russian accent or the low register or the appropriate volume, but I try.  Piper probably laughed herself back to sleep.

We even negotiated the  first weekend - Victoria Day — four days of which featured fireworks, some as close as two houses away.  for a moment, things looked to be in hand.  Had the derecho not zipped between our house and the garage…

In less than one endless minute my favourite tree, a sugar maple I planted 40 years ago, snapped 15 feet up.  It then toppled across the patio, where it had delivered welcome shade for many years, and laid itself across half of the roof, where it patiently waited for someone to remove it (think Pick-up Sticks).   My little green heart is broken, and about 500 square feet of my woodland native garden have been exposed and are now perishing in full sun.  The thirty-year old 12 foot rhodies are only memories.  

Bill, our wonderful forester, managed a dangerous removal while sparing the stone walls and the old doors and windows.  It took three skilled men and a convoy of equipment five full hours.  When the cleared roof was found to have no apparent punctures, we summoned up what energy we had to wave little flags and mumble hooray.   We are both a tad ditsy.  Jon the Magnificent takes the early morning shift; I have no such excuse except looking and feeling 95.  Managing the expectations of two dogs learning to happily co-habitate is tricky but coming along.

A dear friend described retirement as every evening’s being Friday night and every day a Saturday;  these days, every day is Monday.  That I found a fat tick on Piper was no surprise, of course.   

The longest week of our lives was rounded out nicely with an electrical fire in the kitchen microwave . Luckily, I was standing two feet away when two loud clunks were followed by billows of black smoke.  Again,  no real harm done, aside from the disappointment of losing a great top-of-the-line convention/microwave Panasonic  which was probably the youngest thing in the house if you don’t count Piper + paraphernalia.  

You have no doubt surmised that neither painting nor gardening are on the near horizon.    
Frankly, I don’t know how anybody survives a newborn anything.  Shout-out to all of my friends who have raised children.  I honestly didn’t know.  

So it’s still sprinter.  I had such hopes before Easter Monday when we awoke to snow cover.  Sure, it melted by the end of the day but the psychological damage was done.  
I started gardening in earnest in February, planting the native seeds I had collected, labelled, and cold stratified over the winter.  We are now seven weeks in.  Feeling expectant, I dreamed that the tiny pots were full of little green sprigs;  and indeed there was a bountiful harvest!   Unfortunately, my abilities lie in mycology.  

Back to the drawing board.  I continue to watch webinars on habitat gardening but they become increasingly bittersweet.  Exterminating the unfortunate toadstools didn’t help.    Next to nothing has replaced them except calla lilies because a corm is hard to screw up unless you plant them facing down.  My overwintered geraniums are blooming but again, not native.

t wouldn’t matter at all if the bioweb weren’t in dire straits.  The sheer magnitude of severe decline, not to mention full extinction, is terrifying.  Insects, of whom the vast majority are beneficial,  are now in scarce supply and you have to look only at similarly plummeting bird species to see one of the results. Our traditional properties are full of pretty but useless non-native species which support no natural life, turf grass - en ecological desert -  being the most egregious.   I will be gone before the full wave hits but it feels like a rotten inheritance to leave to other generations so habitat gardening and charitable support of environmental agencies like the Nature Conservancy of Canada are must-dos for every one of us who has a garden and/or some spare cash.

I do have some excellent news, however.  If you are lucky enough to live in Mississauga, a force of nature named Jeanne McRight  has spearheaded a new organization called Blooming Boulevards whose goal is to reclaim our boulevards for nature by planting species that insects and birds can rely on.  In three years they have established 200 of such gardens, all of them beautiful as well as ecstatically alive with pollinators.   Because our own property is full of old trees, my efforts lean towards  woodland habitats, but most people have full sun out front and the prairie species really shine.  I am envious as hell but too grateful to trees to complain much.  

As I write this, Jon is banding said trees to protect them from lymantra dispar dispar (aka gypsy moth). Last year almost every tree in our heavily wooded neighbourhood was stripped naked and left covered with buffy egg masses just waiting to finish the job this year.  Many years ago, that happened to us and since then we have driven to the States for Sticky Foot, hand-picked the caterpillars and used pheromone traps  - so successfully that last year we  saw only 8 caterpillars and lots of drowned love-sick males.  There was one egg mass this spring and it’s now defunct, an ex-egg-mass, an egg-mass that has gone to meet its maker.  

It IS possible to fight back.  Unfortunately  because so few residents did step up, the City has had to arrange for aerial spraying.  The wasted tax money is one thing:  the important part of the equation is that  the spray will kill all of  the moths and butterflies at the same time.  All because we may like living around trees but are too lazy to fight for them.

Again we are being called upon to expend some effort if we care  about this beautiful world we have inherited.   

Dragging herself determinedly back from the brink of despair, she said, “Wanta know who spent fifteen minutes in our front yard today?”  (We have four or five bird feeders going)  Thanks for asking.  Well, mainly couples - though not always together because there are eggs to incubate - we have  flickers, white-throated sparrows, cardinals, blue jays, gold-finches, chickadees, red-bellied woodpeckers, red-winged blackbirds, downy woodpeckers, hairy woodpeckers, and mourning doves.   Jon  says he not only heard but actually saw an oven  bird spouting TEAcher, TEAcher, TEAcher!! Wheeling above are the red-tailed hawks and the turkey  vultures.    What I call the Cary Grant bird ("Judy,  Judy, Judy!")  turned out to be a carolina wren, to my great surprise.  We are expecting the orioles to arrive back shortly, and perhaps the wild turkey who roosted in a tree next door last year at a this time.  The brown headed cowbirds also made a brief appearance, although I pray they didn’t stay long enough to parasitize the resident nests.

Best of all, I am in the business of taming a chipmunk!  She wants to be called Sarah. 

Such happiness.  Such worry.  Such a life.