The dwarf apricot tree I planted several years ago has often had a rough time. Seems most years here in southwestern Virginia, the spring puts it through challenges with cold blasts that affect the fruit. Despite this, every year it puts out the most gorgeous display of blossoms. They’re different than the peach tree, richer colored, their delicate pink hues enhanced with a lush magenta-accentuated center. But since they like to start showing their beauty in early March, snows and frost have been the primary challenge each year, as evidenced in the photo from a few years ago. So each year I’ve never had more than a couple of fruits, if any at all. 

This year, for the first time since I planted her, we had no late spring cold blast after the flowering. No struggling to cover the delicate flowers with sheets or plastic overnight while not knocking off or crushing blossoms. I’d pruned her (and the peach and pear) way back and they all responded to the care. Conditions for peach, apricot, pear, berries, tomatoes, fruits of all sort this year seemed to be ideal. There were easily 300 apricots that steadily grew from grape-sized to ping-pong ball to proper-sized apricot. As I waited out their ripening to sweetness, regrettably, I started noticing a brown rot at the base of some. Within a short few weeks over half were infected. The only remedy I found was to remove the infected fruits and discard them. The bountiful harvest was steadily shrinking. 

I hoped I might gain a few dozen, just a small basket. I noticed pokes and bite marks in some of the fallen fruit and accepted this; birds and squirrels occasionally want a taste too. But then one day as I was wistfully watching the fruit on the tree diminish, I noticed the local (large) groundhog hanging out at the trunk. He’d been around for months, putting on poundage apparently by munching on everything easily accessible that was not behind my little fenced in garden plots. I recall thinking, if there’s such a thing as an obese groundhog, I now have met him.

One morning, as I opened my back door, we both were startled: he was hanging four feet up in the branches of the apricot tree, fleshy fruit in mouth! For a split second, he cocked his head and looked at me like the kid with his hand in the cookie jar—except the look was more like your neighbor’s kid was in your house in your cookie jar—and then in a flash he scrambled down. I laughed aloud watching his “love handles” jostle as he raced across the lawn, looking for all the world like a mini-Jackie Gleason in a fur coat. Well that explained the girth; he’d been filling up regularly at the local dessert stop, enjoying the view from the balcony seating. I chalked it up to the perils of being an urban gardener. 

The pear tree fruits later. It also had a plethora of blossoms, and a few hundred fruit. Recent rains seemed to enhance their svelt but swelling pear forms. And then, a couple weeks ago I looked out my 2nd floor back studio window and there he was again!—in the pear tree, fruit in mouth! He has skills—he did not drop it when I shouted, nor when he clambered down to head for his den in the neighbor’s brambles. I’d had enough. I pulled out the Have-a-Heart trap, loaded a pear in it, and waited for a different harvest. Fortunately I was working near my home and could check on it. At lunch I found the trap empty and tripped shut, on its side, as if he’d tried to knock the fruit loose without entry. Or maybe he resented trying to squeeze his extra-large frame in it. I reset it, blocked it in place better, and went back to work. When I returned that evening, he was inside. I collected the cage, and drove to the nearby city park near woods bordering the river to give him a fresh start (illegal, I know—but so is theft). 

However, when I satisfactorily carried my precious cargo to a shady spot in the grass under a tree, and opened the gate flaps, he just lay there...I jiggled the cage to no effect. For a minute I thought, oh for fuck’s sake! My Have-a-Heart trap had given him a heart attack! I dumped his fat limp bod onto the grass (BTW he did NOT smell like apricot blossoms). Although a sometime namesake, I decidedly was NOT up for CPR. But fortunately I noticed he was still breathing. I left him in peace, and when I checked a bit later he’d moved on to the woods. 

And, I am very pleased to report, I did not see any more groundhogs the last few weeks. My guess is Big Hoss had scared all the others away. A seldom seen brown thrasher did peck into several of the pears, and possibly some skunk and/or squirrel snacking occurred. Nonetheless, today I joyfully collected about 25 pounds of pears and look forward to indulging in their sweet and juicy fruits, and sharing the harvest with a few human friends for a change.

Recent heavy rains replenished our always gorgeous Roanoke River. Even a few days after, the currents are still moving fast, so my usual trip went a bit quicker. Along the way I caught sight of several plastic things lodged in newly fallen branches or crevices where the waters had been up higher than normal. I assume some trash that gets left along the banks is washed in when it rains hard, but am starting to realize with a good storm, even litter discarded into the streets may wash down the street sewers and end up in the river. It then slowly breaks into ever smaller bits, where it may eventually ends up in our oceans. So a bozo who tosses a Chik-Filet soda cup out their car window or a bozette who leaves a Mountain Dew bottle in the Appalachian mountains can still be credited with contributing to poisoning all manner of life in our oceans with micro-plastics. Which we also may, ironically but somewhat appropriately, get to eat when we have a meal of seafood.  Kinda brings it full circle, you might say. Small wonder we have health issues with our short-sighted approach to so many things.

In any event, I just hate seeing trash clutter up such beauty. Since I had an early start this evening and the current was swift, my float came to a close well before sundown. So I figured I’d grab a few bottles before getting out. The rains caused a few logjams of branches, which in turn become “nets” for other branches which then also corral floating plastics. I find it so satisfying to rid the trees and banks of plastic debris that even without being prepared with something to put the junk in, once one starts collecting it’s very had to let anything you see stay. 

I happened upon a fly fishing rod and it quickly became a perfect implement to snatch the “flood bags” —those remnants still hanging randomly up in tree limbs.  Within 30 minutes, just collecting along the banks of the last five minutes of the float, I elevated my seat in the tube by about 12”. A rough assessment: Twenty plastic bottles, two glass bottles, three aluminum cans, a pill container, one tennis ball, two flip flops, two kid’s toys, a rubber ball, one fly fishing rod, one Super Tough 3,000 psi 8 foot length of hose, innumerable fragments of plastic bags, sand bags, styrofoam cups, carry out boxes, etc. And all the while I get to clamber on rocks, poke at tree limbs, cool my heels in the river, lounge a bit in my tube in the sunshine on a fine evening after work, and basically, feel like a kid again.

Just to top off the evening, after I returned home, while walking through my backyard tube in hand, and randomly plucking some weeds from my mostly ignored vegetable patch, I was surprised when a small brown blob hopped!—I pulled another weed and was delighted to find a toad, regrettably a rarity in these days of fools spraying their lawns with chemicals. Seeing the little critter jumped my mind right back to when I had a pet toad as a ten year old. It hung out in the window well for a few years at our home. 

I’d sometimes feed it earthworms and watch it slurp them in inch by inch, until just a nib was sticking out of its mouth like a pointy cigar. I even found a way to hit but not kill —only gently stun— house flies (toads won’t eat dead food). I got thread from my mom, and had a lasso ready beforehand and then as the fly was waking up I would tie a thread to a leg. I’d hover the hapless victim like a bizarre miniature flying steer before my warty pal and reveled in watching his eyes catch sight, then focus, zero in, and all at once ZZAAP! and his amazingly long tongue would leave only an empty thread in the air. Now, where have I put my sewing kit?

It’s cool when you catch the right instant for an engaging photo. Lived instances steadily condense into days, moons, and years. Still some other really cool things happen over time. Like when your kids become adults, or you teach or mentor youth and students mature, or you befriend younger folks and get to see them blossom. The extra “cool” is when they share their knowledge and you get to learn stuff you probably would not have from hanging only with your peers. So it goes that after my float the other evening, I had a wonderful chat on the phone with my son Anselm. In a pause between more typical topics, he randomly tossed out “You can see the planet Uranus near the moon right now.”  

My inner city porch perch hasn’t quite allowed me to confirm it, but Uranus has been “visible to the naked eye” near our moon these last few nights. Anselm added more  to chew on: Uranus is 1.82 billion miles (roughly 2.9 billion km) from the earth. (!) We’re mostly lousy holding in mind a sense of numbers on this scale (besides maybe scientists, physicists, and perhaps engineers). But to try and give some perspective, many of us might know the star nearest Earth, (AKA the sun) is 93 million miles from us. You may even recall that “the sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace” as They MIght Be Giants schooled us. Which puts Uranus about 20 times farther from the earth than we are from the sun. Sunlight, which we tend to think of as instantaneous, actually moves at 186,000 miles per second (roughly 300,000 km/second). Lastly he said: if you spot that distant planet Uranus shining like a little star near the moon, each bit of the sunlight that’s reflected off of it took 2 hours and 45 minutes to reach your eyes! Consider that!​

Which of course later, as I reviewed some pix I’d shot on my evening float, had my little brain swirling back around to earth. Because this also means sun rays are not instantly “here” either. Each instant of beautfiul warm sunlight reaching us, making magical sunsets and inspiring dawns, transforming rivers into glistening evanescent pools of silver and gold, even while traveling just shy of 670,000,000 mph, still took about 8 minutes and 20 seconds to get here! And I’m delighted to take the time to notice.

​Dawn, Roanoke River, August 5. We finally have had some restorative steady rains and the river has refilled a bit. It also has made it so muddy with sediment, It’s made it look like images I’ve seen of the Mekong in Vietnam. It’s all part of the natural ongoing processes of renewal. I floated on it yesterday evening and saw no herons of any type. When I pulled out, a youngster was fishing off the bridge and asked wide-eye and hopeful “Didja see any fish?” I had to tell him “No, I usually do, but the river’s so muddy right now, I couldn’t see anything.” “But,” I assured him, “They’re down there somewhere!” 

Prompting me to consider how challenging it must be for the herons and fish eaters like kingfishers to locate their meals after heavy rains. I suppose they head to more shallow creeks, perhaps switching up their diet with a different menu of other live options. But on this gloriously cool morning, I was delighted to first encounter one Great Blue, poking about on the small rocky beach before the other bothersome and loud humans arrive. I watched it take flight on its vast wings, lumbering slow and steady into the morning breeze, up river behind me. It’s rising in the image above. A little farther along the float, as I eased back in my tube, I greeted what I’m pretty sure must be its mate, confirmation the natural order of things was easing back into place.