Bill Felker

Now the the days are the longest of the year and the pieces of summer are fitting together like a puzzle solving itself.

Mulberries and black raspberries are sweetest. Milkweed beetles look for milkweed flowers on the longest days; giant cecropia moths emerge. The first monarch butterfly caterpillars eat the carrot tops.

Damselflies and daddy longlegs are everywhere when black raspberries come in. Mosquitoes, chiggers, and ticks have reached their summer strength their presence fitting tightly with that of giant black cricket hunters .

I got up at 4:30 in the morning, haunted by a troubling dream. I listened for birds at my window as I got dressed. Not a sound, not even a car passing on the street. And then I went outside with Bella, my border collie, to walk in the dark.

I started south at 4:50. I heard birds by the time I reached a streetlight: At first just sporadic chirping of robins, then their rhythmic singsong.

The sky seems so very far away, and moon and stars and planets so out of reach, constellations hidden often by clouds and haze. But really a person might simply look around to find the heavens. The land has a galaxy of signs, astronomical resource of delicate and fragrant detail.

Yesterday was the 103rd birthday of my friend Ruby. Now I have received numerous notes and messages from Ruby through the years. She is a fine observer, and since 1992, she has informed me about kettles of buzzards, flocks of gold finches and pine siskins, early snowdrop blossoms, the first fireflies, the first autumn juncos, the songs of snowy crickets among many many other things

She loved to drive and one day not too many years before her 100th birthday, she invited me out to ride around the countryside.

Like a collector of rocks or a hobbyist or researcher, I take notes about what happens in nature and when it happens. I collect scraps of information from my walks and drives, and I try to organize them. The people who keep track of basketball statistics and other sports records remind me of myself. I have a nephew and a brother-in-law like that. For all of us, there are never enough scraps.