Friday, September 09, 2005

The way to get honey out of a honeysuckle flower was to very, very gently pull the middle part of the flower out through the stem. If your touch was light enough a small bead of honey would form, briefly, on the very bottom of the stem. You would have to change tactics immediately and very quickly dart the tip of your tongue forwards to taste the honey; if you were too slow in getting there it would slip itself back into the stem and then you'd have to suck it out, which always ended up tasting like bitter pollen.
I could spend hours laying under the honeysuckle bushes, trying to coax out the sweetness, half a brain on the lookout for fire ants.

This cold is probably what I get for standing in the rain to watch the Posies on Sunday, in which case it was completely worth it. I have this sudden urge to find someone with a boat and stage a Viking raid on Mercer Island. Anyone have a horned hat?
A late night phone call last night involved three dirty jokes and a, "the trouble with you is that you don't know how to sell yourself." I tried to ask where and how, but he was already off on a reunion in Florida that will not happen because I will not go back there. My strangest phone calls always come from the East Coast in the middle of the night.

The doodle bugs, they lived in inverted cone-shaped homes in the sand. An unwary ant would teeter at the edge of the cone and fall in, and the sand that was disturbed by all of its little tiny legs would alert the doodle bug to the presence of lunch. It was only then that he would pop out with his teeny pinchers snapping and haul that ant down under the earth. It was possible to dig out the doodle bug, but the better way was to lay next to his home and try to touch the sand just enough with a blade of grass or a finger tip. If you were both very careful and very lucky, he would mistake your grass or finger for a tasty bug. It took a light touch to coax him into the light.

No comments: