Pretty much everyone in our area has symptoms. Your nose runs constantly while you’re outdoors. Or your throat is sore every day. Or your eyes bother you all the time; sometimes they outright sting. The weather’s been fine. What gives?
It’s smoke. Canada, our cherished neighbor, is on fire. Winds carry the smoke our way, and recent rains, far from clearing the air, have brought the smoke from high in the atmosphere down to where our respiratory systems really notice it. I rolled over in bed last night, and ended up facing the slightly open window. Which made me cough until I closed the window. And I had to cut short this afternoon’s walk with Sue, as there wasn’t enough air in the air to carry me up the hills.
We can’t smell the smoke yet, although I seem to remember being able to smell it last time Canada burned, but it affects us even so. We can see it sometimes as a whitish-gray haze in the air, even at this remove. It must be very difficult for the people near the fires, and for the firefighters battling the flames. Poor Canada.
There’s other visible matter in the air around here, too: cottonwood cotton. Puffs of it float around on air currents. You can catch them in your hands even more easily than you’ll be able to catch fireflies when they show up later this month. Also like fireflies, puffs of cottonwood cotton launch themselves from your hands when you open them back up. Air currents lift them right off your palms, and they resume their floating adventures.
Today’s the first day that enough cotton has made it to the ground to settle in the grass and woods and against curbs. It gathers in piles only slightly heavier than air, and the breezes play with them that way as well. Drifts of fluff.
My sweetheart and I drove the back roads to Dexter for lunch this week, and learned along the way that yellowwood trees are having a particularly wonderful spring. They have fantastic white flowers that form cascading clusters, reminiscent of wisteria flowers, and the clusters can be fifteen inches long. Some of the yellowwoods along Joy Road are blooming so spectacularly that you can’t see the leaves at all. The trees look made of blossoms.
The subject of conversation in French class today was amusing or touching things that have happened to you while volunteering, and I believe Ellen won the prize. She’s a retired therapist and, in her retirement, she has had therapy dogs. Her dog at present is a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, an outgoing and affectionate fellow named Archie with a soft coat, long ears, and prominent, brown eyes that implore you to pet him. All of us in French class know Archie, as he attends regularly. He took Spanish, too, until the class got canceled.
When Ellen takes Archie to a retirement home or hospital, he’s small enough that she can easily lift him up for folks to pet, and Archie enjoys his work. She says that he’s “on” as soon as they get out of the car on therapy days, greeting everyone they encounter, starting and ending with the parking attendant.
Finnegan, who preceded Archie, was a golden retriever, and a big one at that. He was tall enough to rest his head on someone’s lap or bed, no lifting required. He had a special gift for knowing who really needed comfort, too. On the down side, Finnegan would get bored if the person stopped petting him and Ellen continued her conversation with the person rather than moving on to the next potential petter.
Finn would get bored enough that he’d look around for some other way to amuse himself. He was particularly fond of tennis balls. You’d think he would have been disappointed in his therapy settings, which would be tennis-ball deserts. You’d be wrong. Finn found tennis balls a-plenty. Attached to the feet of walkers. He lived in the never-extinguished hope that, given time, he could liberate at least one ball from its pesky walker. Ellen reports she became adept at winding up conversations in a hurry. Finn was a nice dog. Archie’s a nice dog also. I’m delighted he has an interest in French. Interestingly enough, so did Finn.
By the by, that favorite nesting site on the muskrat lodge in the Green Road pond? The one that neither the swans nor the geese wanted this year, despite battling for it last spring? A heron has been sitting on it! Great blues almost always nest in trees but will, occasionally, grace a muskrat lodge.
6 June 2025