Wild Kingdom!

Yesterday I did some gardening with John and I think Mutual of Omaha could host its "Wild Kingdom" from our yard! First we went into the backyard so I could trim off dead limbs from a bush. We met with our friendly neighborhood cat, who probably isn't feral but lives its entire life outdoors. He is overly friendly but was covered in fresh wounds from a fight, so he alternated between purring madly and hissing at John. I've seen this cat go berserk before, so after a couple of hisses, I forbade John from approaching the cat and ushered us out the gate to the front yard.


While I yanked the ever-sprouting crape myrtle shoots, John found a live cidada (huge, horrible grasshopper-like bugs that hum unceasingly for about three months in the South). Then we found a dead black beetle that reminded me of something I'd see on a National Geographic television special focusing on a tropical jungle. It was black, the size of my thumb with giant legs, and had large white circles on its back to look like eyes.

As I was kneeling in the pine straw and grass, yanking crape myrtle shoots, suddenly a snake slithered out from beneath my knee! It was a baby black snake, maybe six inches long. We've spotted perhaps six snakes in our yard in the year we've lived here, all different types and sizes, which is just a little bit creepy.

I finished with the crape myrtle shoots and some weeding and had just about had it with all this nature, so John and I walked up the driveway when I noticed something lumbering along looking like a monster out of a science fiction movie. It was, in fact, a squirrel that had either had its back skinned (perhaps by our resident hawk) or was dying of some kind of leprous disease. The poor thing was crawling slowly along our driveway, up our side porch, back down through the bushes, over our fence, and disappeared into our back yard. My skin felt like it was crawling just looking at the poor wretched creature.





I must not have learned my lesson because I took John outside this morning for a "whistling walk." He was allowed to bring the tin whistle his Grandmom brought him from Ireland and he whistled as we walked along. When we returned and played in the backyard, I discovered that it is that time of year when the giant spiders the size of a digit of my thumb create huge webs between our trees, such that one is walking along innocently and finds one's head encased in web (cue the screaming like a girl). Also, in the hot, moist morning, the mosquitoes were out in swarms, gathering around my body (I have at least 11 bites on my legs right now) and around my precious babies. I rushed us into our screened sun room pretty quickly.

Just let me know when all this nature is done with and it's safe to leave my house again!