Missing out on summer events

I missed the departure of the purple martins this summer. Heretofore, this has been the time when all the locally housed martins got together and had what might be called a departure party. With all their springtime verve they would dip and sway, chuckle and chortle and do show-off air maneuvers. The party lasted for several days, then the visiting flocks began to go back to their base and make ready for their southern journey.

So, at my place, previously, the parents and fully fledged children were left alone. For a few days they all lined up, facing the same way, on a utility wire and made their own happy sounds. I think they were choosing their flight director and stewardesses and so forth. Then one morning they all were gone without leaving a single feather or echo of their happy talk.

This summer, why did I miss all this? Simple answer: They didn't come in the first place. Someone has put up a prettier house and lured my martins away.

I missed gathering a huge bouquet of my pink amaryllis, aka Surprise Lily. Arranged in the green glass vase, I enjoyed the indoor fragrance for a whole week. The buds left on the stalk when it is cut just keep opening until the last petal drops away.

I had two clumps positioned between peony bushes. Thus protected, they came up and bloomed. But the big curving row of them didn't make it. I forgot to put down markers where they would come up, quite often overnight, and be 2 inches high by dawn. Guess what? The greedy lawnmower ate several of them. This fall those lily bulbs will be unearthed and re-earthed between the rest of the peony bushes.

I haven't, as of today, seen flying grasshoppers. It has been too hot to go out and watch where I know I can see them, too many mosquitoes, too glaring for old eyes. I have plenty of time, I tell myself, just as the grasshopper did in Aesop's tale, "The Grasshopper and the Ant." Poor old fellow, he was having too much fun leaping to stop and think of winter food.

Grasshopper gurus state that if a boy could jump as high and as far, in proportion to his size, as a grasshopper can, he could jump over a barn. Gurus know all about wiggle room -- note they didn't say how big a barn.

A click in my mind, somewhat like the take-off click of a grasshopper, opens the door to the re-run room of memory. I think of my early writing. I mean early, about the third grade. We were assigned to write a short story. I wrote one, about half a page, and entitled it, "The Grasshopper and the Ant." It was almost identical to Aesop's tale. I may have dressed the insects to inject a smidgen of difference. The moral was the same. What the heck? Stephen King chose many famous short stories such as "The Pit and the Pendulum" and wrote his own version of the story! Where were the plagiarism police?

Some said there was a gorgeous rainbow one summer afternoon. I missed it.

And the baby rabbits, how I missed them! At nature's appointed time they have, for years, emerged from the flower border along the back walk. Their little noses, whiskers, bright eyes and alert ears looked like some Mary Engelbreit painting.

I saw the parents making plans and waited. One day, while sitting in the the porch swing, I witnessed a noisy bird brouhaha. About six bluejays and even more black birds were diving like kamikaze pilots at a certain place in the flower patch. I didn't go to investigate even though it went on for nearly an hour. It might be a Tasmanian devil or a cobra I excused.

The next day I did go investigate. Nothing there but a few feathers the birds had lost in their frenzy. Do Tasmanian devils eat little rabbits?

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.