Our house has been under siege for weeks now. No matter what egress we choose, there is a guard. We are delighted. The guards are male cardinals. Earlier this spring, our next-door neighbor reported five male cardinals having a sing-off in their yard and expressed doubt that the yard could support five cardinal families.
There must be at least two nests very near our house, judging by the red sentries posted front and back. We haven’t spied the nests yet, but we haven’t spent a lot of time looking: we don’t want to do anything that might disrupt the families. We sure hope we’ll get to see some cardinal babies before they’re grow up and fly away. In the meantime, we’re enjoying the scarlet guardians.
Cottonwood fluff season began in Tree Town in the last few days. Seeds have launched. They’re floating and drifting. When they land on water, they don’t necessarily stick. They skitter across the surface with air currents, often in directions other than those of water currents. Traver Creek this morning flowed west as usual, while the fluff on top of it blew west. Cottonwood seeds in the air seem to spend as much time moving upward and sideways as they do moving downward.
My favorite fluff sighting so far occurred at the edge of the woods near Thurston Pond. Along the path there, burdock leaves cup the stuff like they’re serving it up in quantity. Did you know birds, fish, and, small mammals eat the fluff? Some birds, including cardinals, even use it as nesting material.
Monday, on a drive across town, my husband pointed out a bird which he called a sandpiper. I knew that wasn’t the right name, but the right one didn’t come to me until shortly thereafter, when I was sitting by a pond where a bird kept crying, kill-deer, kill-deer, kill-deer! And that reminded me of Daughter Number Four’s student who wanted to know if killdeer really killed deer.
During our shift at the Thrift Shop yesterday, my friend Lee and I got to clear up another misconception. A customer was wearing a shirt with fanciful renderings of plants on it, and I asked her about it. She pulled her shoulder bag out of the way to give us a better look at the drawings and said they were made-up plants from the Henry Potter series.
“Mandrake?” I asked. “Mandrake is real.”
“No, it’s not,” the young woman said. “J. K. Rowling made it up.”
Lee contributed at this point. “Mandrake is a real plant,” she assured the customer. Whereupon the customer whipped out her cell phone and looked it up.
“Huh,” she reported. “Mandrake is real!” She was quite chuffed about it.
My sweetheart and I saw something new to us in the neighborhood yesterday. A honey of a white sports car with green wheel covers, parked in a driveway on Lexington. We smiled at each other and agreed it was pretty cute. Then we drove around the block to get another look at it and see what kind it was. Mazda Miata. Sweet.
My husband was in the kitchen shortly before eleven o’clock Wednesday night when he thought he heard our garage door in motion. That made no sense. I was upstairs. He opened the door from the house to the garage to take a look. The garage was closed up tight, as it should be.
But the light that turns on when the overhead door goes up or down, was on. Odd, but life is full of mysteries.
Wednesday morning, when he checked his phone, all became clear. Our neighbor Cory texted that he’d noticed our garage door was open when he’d been out taking their wheelie bins to the curb. He’d been about to call us and let us know when he realized he remembered our garage door code.
So, instead, he strolled over, keyed in the code on our remote, and closed the door for us. He tucked our house in for the night and went home.
This is part of the pleasure of living on a court. All those front doors facing each other make for easy friendships among neighbors, friendships that can deepen and grow stronger with time. Proximity and shared space make it straightforward to offer help and to receive it when needed. And sometimes court neighbors do nice things for each other whether or not they will ever be noticed.
We have cardinal sentinels standing guard out front and out back. And we have friends and neighbors all around, keeping an eye out for each other and us. We could not ask for more.
5 June 2026