Wednesday, August 30, 2006

ok, some faces after all

sphinx moth hornworm caterpillar discovered hiding under the green beans. I don't know anything about bugs, worms but I think this one will turn into one of those moths that look like hummingbirds. if a cat doesn't eat it first.spadefoot toad. I accidently dug her up when I was planting some dogwoods by our neighbors' chainlink. a lucky miss of the shovelblade. she must have also survived applications of roundup to weeds and an earlier going over w/ a tractor tiller. sometimes being able to dig a hole is the perfect thing. she's pretty dazed here, before the reburial.
once, when I was like 9 I caught and kept a frog, which died. so I buried it in the ground in my neighborhood. I also buried in the back of my mind a scheme to later exhume the body when it would be just bones. then I'd have a frog skeleton which would be fantastic! when what seemd the appropriate span of time had passed (probably less than a month) I went to dig up my frog skeleton. I was having a hard time finding it down there where I remembered leaving it. then, off in the periphery I saw something kicking around in the dirt I'd been spading out. yeah, he had totally faked me out but he must not have counted on being dug up again. I only remember vaguely what happened then. amnesty, I think it was. I went home without a frog skeleton.

this nighthawk had broken its wing somehow, probably hit by a car. also called nightjars or goatsuckers, though they’re not related to chupacabras. they seem to be more closely related to boomerangs. that’s what they look like hurtling though the air at dusk, catching bugs in that big maw.
a couple more nighthawks
our newlywed friends in the house next door are in their 60’s. they like to spend some of their evenings eating late dinners or playing board games in their camper trailer parked outside.
on the other side of town I’ve noticed a place in the road where his first name is written very clearly in tar. knowing he worked for the city, I asked him about it one day. he kind of blushed and sheepishly confessed that it was him. she has an electric guitar she sometimes plays and sings with.
in their home, they have a room where their cat lives. this room has pictures of other cats, as well as a telephone. when they moved in they gave us a tour of the place and how they’d been fixing it up. “we’re just tickled, I’ll tell ya,” he kept saying.
the other night we went to sleep to the sound of crickets and their rolling dice on the kitchen table out in the trailer.

1 comment:

zlb said...

those horn worms are scary creatures. I have many memories of finding them in the tomatoes as a kid and poking at them with sticks. so gross. One time when there were some big tractors doing road work on our street we got one of the worker guys to run over a horn worm with his big scoop . . . it made a big ol' yeller stain on the road.