nature: an update

Reports of Connecticut being quite similar really to southern Arizona are premature (sorry, Meg, and welcome to Baroque Mansions): I have deliberately left out of my reports any mention of the bear, deer, opossums and - yes - yeti that roam the copious woods hereabout. It is not unheard-of to be at the sink doing the dishes and to look up and see a deer standing in the back garden looking earnestly at you through your window.

At Christmastime, though their rates are extortionate, they will sometimes let you afix red noses to them and pose them in the front, draped with lights. There is talk of unionising this activity - locals predict that the rates will go through the roof (and possibly up the chimney).

The yeti are, as Chip Dale points out in an informative comment, very shy. They eat ticks, which is the reason the sturdy yoemen of Connecticut tolerate them: that, and the fact that they don't eat hicks, with which the woods, as RH points out, are also swarming. Many of the hicks are the younger siblings of the yoemen, you see.

When I say "verdant" it is that everywhere you look, everything is green (and huge! The ferns are huge, the trees are huge the tomatoes are huge! So are the cars, And the sky.) Only the dogs are not huge, and they are also not green - only if they haven't been in the angelica. If they have, it can take half an hour to get the little burrs out of their fur. Sometimes - though thankfully not this week - the humidity is such that you can't dry off after a shower unless you go stand in front of a fan. They announce the humidity level in the weather reports; last week it was 81%.

In the midst of so much greenness, and humidity and singing crickets and cicadas who I've never seen, and the empirical demands of the weather and the air conditioning, and the swimming, which is trashing what's left of my muscles, & despite the fact that I'm dreaming up a storm every night (and wake up feeling utterly drained, as if I've had more than a full day already, and with a crick in my neck) the poetry's been all sort of washed out of me for the moment. Lots of ideas and potential projects are in abeyance in my brain, and that is going to start getting annoying pretty fast. (edited in: I thought about this remark while I was going up and down in the pool just now, surrounded by floppy-haired dogs all running along beside me on the shore, and have decided it is all too typical of the faulty baroque thinking that goes on. We are on holiday. All is as it should be! Ah, yes.)

Last night Mama Baroque did make her legendary gin & tonics, which are like a kind of nature around here. Large, bottomless, made with Bombay Sapphire gin, and only served in a very particular glass that only exists in this house. They move too fast to be photographed.

Other recent sightings here on the mountainside have included a very big green dragonfly and about a million crickets in flight. Yesterday was Cricket Day, in which every time I took a step on the grass, something fluttered up and past me - on one occasion, nearly into my hair - to alight on a rock or leaf ten feet away. They become instantly camouflaged, but I did manage, as you can see from the above, to perform a miracle - incidentally proving Wales' foremost stripper wrong, which is something I hate to do. I've clearly missed a career as the Don McCullin of cricket photography.

One of the crickets I love was lying dead on the path up to the pool, all tangled in bits of dried grass. I tried to take his picture but it wouldn't take. I forget which breed they are, but they really do remind me of Johnny Tremain - or possibly Daniel Defoe - some dissenting printing type, anyway of the Breeches era, anyway. And he was dried in the sun to a shiny, dark, tragic brown.