My friend Mary’s son Isaac is quite the gardener, and he has made her yard a showplace. It’s basically one large garden. The colors and textures have changed as the season progressed, culminating in the present late-summer spill of abundance. Tall billows of purply-blue hyssop and red cardinal flower are particularly lovely now, in the fashion of a cottage- garden, with beds of dramatically colored salvia at the borders. Even Isaac’s notes-to-self are colorful. He’s marked spaces where he wants to plant more bulbs this fall with bright pink flags, a flotilla of them on the hill.
This is how Mary’s garden presents itself to the eye. You spend some time oohing and ahhing and identifying. And then you do a slow blink and realize how much going on there, how busy a place it is. Every plant teems with insect life, particularly bees, rings and tiers of them up and down every bloom. Butterflies flitter and light and fly again. Isaac has made the pollinators exceedingly happy.
The construction project in front of the local middle school is finally wrapping up. This summer’s holes have been filled and the lawn regraded and replanted. New lighting is going in. There’s still a big hole in the street, but one of the workers told me there’s a supply problem with the asphalt. When I walked past the building yesterday, another worker was tossing what sounded like short lengths of re-rod into a motorized cart.
All needs to be in readiness soon, as school starts on Monday. It used to be illegal for public schools in Michigan to start before Labor Day, but that no longer seems to be the case. School systems got waivers from the state, ostensibly to accommodate sports schedules. It’s not clear they even bother any more. My sister-in-law in Utah says kids there started back last week.
The Chelsea Community Fair is next week. Kids work towards the fair all summer. They have to be there. So Chelsea schools don’t start till the thirty-first of August. Good. The eager, earnest children and their animals are the highlight of the fair.
Thursday nights in Ypsilanti are Cruise Nights in the summer. People show up with their classic cars and park them in Depot Town for everyone to admire. There are food and a band and dancing and family-friendly activities. We have, by chance, been in Depot Town a number of Thursday evenings this summer, enjoying dinner at the Side Track.
We sit outdoors when the weather’s fine, which it was last night. The main action is around the corner, the noise of it forming our sound track. We were event adjacent. Dinner took forever to arrive, affording us what felt like unlimited time to observe the goings-on in our area.
What we learned is that many “participants” in the event didn’t really participate in it. One man drove his motorcycle repeatedly back and forth past the restaurant, with the occasional foray around the block, punctuating the ride with great, noising revving of the engine. Party after party of pedestrians—a dad and his twelvish-year-old son, couples with and without dogs, family groups, lone walkers—passed our table, made the turn into Cruise Night territory, disappeared for about five minutes, then passed us going back the way they’d come.
The band were the only passersby we noticed that didn’t fit the pattern. The others seemed almost as event-adjacent as we were. Or it could be that they were so practiced after a summer of Thursday Cruise Nights that they’ve become efficient attenders.
The commonplace wild creatures in our lives seem mostly to tolerate our behaviors in their ongoing efforts to coexist. But yesterday morning, a low-flying helicopter couldn’t be ignored. It nearly buzzed a nearby tree, and the birds that were perched in the tree bailed out. You could see their thought bubbles as they flew off. A fair summary would be, “You’re too big and too close and way too noisy!”
The spider that lives in our laundry tub doesn’t bother to bail out. She’s built herself a modest web in the front left corner, and holds her position midway up when I empty the dehumidifier into the sink. She survives the daily deluge, and if she can make a living in the laundry tub, more power to her. If she’s sending up any thought bubbles, they’re too small to read.
A woodchuck stretched out in the sun on the top step of our deck. It looked like a beached whale, of the shapeless, furry persuasion. It napped there for some time, then swam off across the grass. Its thought bubble read, “Zzzzz.”
21 August 2026