Or you could just call it a tricycle

Apple surprise

The builder who developed our street back in the 1950s planted crabapple trees in the front yards, some of which remain.  In a good year the pink blossoms make a fine show in the spring before the wind and rain knocks them down.         

And later, as summer winds down, the crabapples themselves deluge the driveway and the lawn.   

Early one morning these three deer were after them like they were vacuuming.

   Along with the crabapple trees we have another apple tree that never belonged.  It looked like a crabapple, to our unsophisticated eyes, but the blossoms were more white than pink and instead of prodigious numbers of crabapples it produced only a couple of odd little green apples.  Or none.

      And so it went until this year - our twenty-first in the house - when the odd tree on the end pushed out a bumper crop of big, red, actually edible apples.  We don’t know what variety, but the ones that don’t have bug holes and brown spots, of which there are a few, are actually pretty good.  

   Why the tree would suddenly produce this year, out of nowhere, is a mystery.  We wonder if it has to do with the big wasp nest that appeared in the adjacent crabapple this year, also a first.  We think the wasps have taken care of the moths that used to plague the crabapples. 

   But really, as with much of the actual world, there is so much we just don't know.

The Constituent

   So my older brother likes to snap photos with his cell phone, which is good, and to share his better snaps with me, which is also good, but then he goes and shares this photo of Senator Leahy, which is so not good.  

     Think for a moment about how many times our good senator has been photographed in the course of his life.  Thousands and thousands of times.  And yet my brother finds a way not merely to take but also to not immediately delete and instead remarkably to share what must be the worst Leahy photo ever taken.  

     It's not Leahy himself of course -- the walking-with-his-mouth-full notwithstanding -- but the constituent in back smelling his fingers.  ("Did I wash my hands?  I think I washed them ...")

Fly fishing - season 1

   I have been out only a handful of times with the new fly rod and have not done too badly.  Two rainbows and a brook trout at Meccawe Pond, on small black flies that actually looked like flies.  A yellow perch and a rock bass at Woodward Reservoir, on woolly buggers.  A small sunfish and a calico bass at Lake Cochituate, on a gray and silver-bodied streamer.

     Still do do:  brown trout, any trout in a stream, bass with mouths large or small, pickerel, whitefish, and so much more.