Duck Creek Idyll

It is that time of year, when the evenings are so fleeting and yet so lovely that it hurts. Why didn't I use the long summer evenings better? Why do these have to end so soon? We hurry down to Duck Creek for a wade before the light is all gone.

On the way, a creeper-strangled silo glows in the dying sunlight. How can it be this beautiful here, where we get to live? I want to roll in the sidelit grass.

On the path to the stream, a pawpaw hangs, still green and hard as a rock, giving no hint to the mushy tropical sweetness it soon will achieve. There is a small bowl brimming with pawpaws on my windowsill, and this morning in the dark of a power outage I smelled them ripening. Ahh. Soon I will bite into my first wild-gathered pawpaw.
Lower down in the tree, a pawpaw sphinx, Dolba hyloeus, eats, a pthalo blue spur springing from his hind end. He's done a number on that pawpaw leaf. That's his job. This is Joe Garris' photo of an adult, lifted from a wonderful silkmoth site.

It reminds me of a tabby cat.

Great lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica (so called because it was thought to cure the clap) glows at pathside.
We bring our friend Oona along, and she wades in to have a better look at a colony of whirligig beetles scudding madly on the water's surface.
The dwindling light renders her a Renoir painting. "Mommy all wet, Daddy all wet, Oona all wet," she says, flapping her hands. When and how did she learn to talk? It seems like yesterday she was getting her face washed by Chet, who was afraid she'd fall off the sofa.
Liam skips stones.
Why don't we just go wade in streams? There are so many things to be discovered.