To the editor:

Due to some wonderful new technology, I now have hearing aids which let me hear bird songs I have never heard before. So early in the morning I come downstairs and sit in my little screened porch and listen and marvel. I know that fairly soon there will be no sound and we will know all too well that our summer is half over and that there will be a quietness.

Right now I can hear the bummingbirds going “Tsk Tsk Tsk” as they try to fight each other away from the brilliant red crocosmia (a lily with tiny gladiola like flowers), goldfinches who seem very active, and the varied songs invented by the catbirds. I lure them to the deck with strawberries when they get too mushy for me to eat.

A faithful reader corrected me when I said I hadn’t read anything about the miserable caterpillars. I now know I should have looked at coopext@uri.edu.So I went to the site and saw pictures of trees with row after vertical row of dead caterpillars. Apparently that long, damp spring was perfect for a virus to flourish and kill them. No words however on the winter moth which doesn’t seem to have done any damage. So we can look forward to local peaches this summer which will be a relief from the stone hard ones coming up from Georgia and South Carolina. Of course there was corn for July 4 – I meant local corn which is now available in great quantity for our delight.

I think I have mentioned how Cezanne thought that gray made colors more intense and so painted his studio. Keeping this in mind, the other gray day I realized how true this was when you are surrounded by trees and shrubs. The number of different greens was amazing and impossible to count as there are not enough descriptive words. Next time you are driving in the countryside on a gray day turn off the radio and just look! and see if Cezanne was right.

Milkweed flowers are over and although I look and look for little pinholes in the leaves, a sign that the tiny green larva of the monarch are hatched and starting the long process to metamorphosis, no luck so far. Queen Anne’s Lace is now showing its little crocheted white doilies along the edge of the path, and there are other path edge lovers like chicory and some grasses. Joe Pye Weed seems to be early with tiny pink buds already showing on stalks about my head height (i.e. five feet) so we will see how the present lack of rain affects them.

Embrace August!

Sidney Tynan

Little Compton