Angelkeep will soon be seeing school buses passing by the driveway without a stop. No need at this location. Plenty get onboard just a trifle further down the road. Although it’s actually only mid-summertime, changes are easily recognizable.
Gone long ago was the historical restart of school which typically occurred after Labor Day. That holiday will be celebrated for the 141st time.
Back in the day, those lucky enough to have spent the summer in a lake cottage would be packing up for the change back to reality at home, and school’s resumption. Angelkeep remembered running barefoot as a farm child near Uniondale, chasing bugs, and enjoying the carefree heated days of August at home with no school and with little to be of concern.
In truth, for this writer of Angelkeep, that’s not changed except for the barefoot-running location.
While the school buses pass by Angelkeep, the entertainment in the back yard returns to trying to capture summer’s perfect photo of a dragonfly. Or sometimes that bug chasing ends up with a photo of a six-legged, winged, three-bodied creature never before identified. That photo leads to research, Angelkeep’s form of continued education. Those Lancaster Central School teachers of long ago did a good job of instilling the lifelong desire to learn, even though math yet sometimes includes finger movements.
Angelkeep rocked barefooted on the patio, remembering the double brood of wrens observed from the very same rocking chair during the earlier days of late spring and early summer. The wrens first built a nest in a backyard exit garage grade door light fixture. The fixture was decades older than Angelkeep’s garage. Its copper structure with frosted glass panels had been church door lighting until they were replaced with a more modern look. The church gladly sold the old useless fixtures. The purchase at the time was well ahead of any consideration of building a home. Angelkeep utilized the old lights in a structure based marginally on the idea of an Irish summer castle called a “keep.”
The wrens like the concept so well they built their house of sticks, moss, and grass inside. Wrens filled the fixture up eight inches to the light bulb itself. That dangerous fire hazard necessitated being removed. The wise wrens rebuilt in a wren box hanging from the pond-side corkscrew willow tree. There they raised two broods in the summer.
All the wren children are long gone. When wren fledglings leave the nest the parents, who have diligently been feeding them, become their school teachers and instruct them on survival. This included where to find their own food, how to fly, and all they needed to know about “the birds and the bees.” Wren classes equaled geography, physics, and sex education. Without math they probably resorted to counting on their claws, just like this writer’s use of fingers.
Sitting on the patio to observe nature while rocking barefoot had drawbacks. Patio time typically included patio pan fires. Burning wood pops. Hot embers jump to the cement. Bare feet need shod to get up for a fresh glass of iced tea or adding wood to the fire. True also for chasing that butterfly that just landed on the far end of the patio among the pansies growing in a whiskey barrel.
Such was the relaxed bliss of an Angelkeep late-summer day.
Does, unlike wrens, kept their newborns with them for a good long time. Special patio treats included Mama Doe bringing out a fawn into the open ground. It began to grow old enough to see spots fading. Mama lingered over the corn kernel piles, dining on what tasted to her like M&M Peanuts tasted to the man in the patio rocker. The fawn, often a twin pair, loved being in the wide open space between the forest and the pond. They forgot dining on corn in favor of running at full speed, changing directions as fast as a dragonfly dancer, and leaping largely.
Prancing fawns brought back a vivid memory of a young lad running, spinning, and chasing after lightning bugs over the farmyard while holding a Ball canning jar, its lid punched with nail holes.
It’s about this time that reality and history became a blur, perhaps due to moist eyes. Perhaps the mind’s so mingled with decades of memory that gathering thoughts resulted in a muddled mix of worlds of today and yesterday.
That’s Angelkeep mid-summer. Summer bliss that dwells more on memories than on the few years remaining as the future.
Mr. Daugherty is a Wells County resident who, along with his wife Gwen, enjoy their backyard and have named it “Angelkeep.”
