Come along with me, out my back yard door...

Let us sit for tea, and ignore our chores.

The pain tension causes is overwhelming, and I'm having a difficult time getting my well-being back on track.  The grief from Zoe's passing is more than I had imagined it would be.  Much care was spent on her; her last few months, and the void left won't close.

Lacey's grief has consumed my life since Zoe's absence, as she refused food for almost three days before we discovered she would eat small portions of fried chicken breast from Popeye's fast foods.

Desperate to get her back onto her normal food and full meals, we started applying an appetite stimulant gel to the inside of her ear flap, then force fed her before she started eating some of her regular food.  She's still not back to her old self, and I'm beginning to wear out mentally.

It's early morning, and I'm doing something I haven't made an effort to do at all this year...eat my breakfast on the back deck.  A sandwich plate sits in front of me with three pathetic little round circles of flour and whole grains called crackers, hastily covered in almond butter with a messy splotch of peach jam in the center.  A hot cup of Assam tea and a tall glass of ice water, and breakfast is beginning.  Eat your hearts out, my friends.

My thoughts are being buried under the songs of cicadas.  I'd like to dig them out, but I'm beginning to become a little bit bonkers listening to those little beasties accelerating in two seconds from quiet to chainsaw decibels, then eventually they are abruptly back to quiet.  A second type is revving up, going full steam, and then slowing down to quiet.  It's like a hundred families of cicadas out here, firing up at different intervals, over and over and over and over and over...help!

With those head splitting melodious songs resonating back and forth between my ears, I catch a glimpse of a squirrel running along the top portion of my wood fence, his left feet on top of the fence panels and his right feet on the 2 x 4 board six inches down.  A weirdly different approach I haven't noticed before with any of my squirrels.

Maybe he's trying to be incognito from the neighbor's dog, but it doesn't work.  The dog is barking, so the squirrel sits up and peeks over the fence for a minute.  The barking stops and the little guy scampers headfirst down my side of the fence, racing across the patio like the dog's hot on his rear,  jumps for the ash tree and disappears into the canopy.

A cardinal begins to sing above the cicada songs, and soon a pair of Carolina wrens appear, inspecting branches for insects.  A robin chimes in, then the harsh cries of blue jays echo back and forth across the street in front.  A hummingbird flits in and out of the clematis, and up into the persimmon tree.  A honeybee flies in loops across the patio into the garden beyond, while the Joe Pye Weed flowers have halos of tiny insects flying above them.

The temperature and humidity are rising, but a cooling breeze brushes my legs ever so lightly once in a while.  I thought I would wait out the cicadas to discover what time they close up shop in the heat of the day, but I'm calling it quits, as sweat is trickling down my back like rain drops running down the windshield of my car.  Phooey!

Moth rescued from birdbath,

 drying out on chaise lounge away from ants.

Garden squatters - Miss Ivy and her clan

Mushrooms growing on mossy lava rock_

crown is 1/8th inch across.

Spicebush Swallowtail resting

 after what appears to have been a rough journey.

Leafcutter Bee (I think) on Joe Pye Weed_

bee also rests inside the mallow flowers

Postscript:

Since I'm apparently not the smartest cookie on the block, I had to water the patio planters in early afternoon, and almost washed out to the street and down the block in a river of sweat.