River Otter

The river otters are out this evening. Three of them are partaking of an underwater stroll along the shoreline, quietly gliding, puckering with bubbles the dark jade surface. Their bubble quilting patterns let me track them as their exploration unfolds. 

There are no bugs to speak of when you sit out on the deck of an evening, only tiny dust specks with wings, so delicate you hate to even blow them away for fear of crushing them with an exhalation. They don’t bite, or if they do, given that they are dwarfed by the head of a pin, their mouths must be nearly microscopic. So go ahead, bite if you need to, I’ll do my bit for wildlife. I wonder if they eat? I wonder if they live only a day and then die so don’t really need to eat? Were they only born to be food? And if so, for whom? It may be that they alight on the smallest petal of the night blooming hazelbingy thereby triggering the opening of a secret plant passage necessary for pollination and that the world would suffer even faster rates of ecological decline if they were to disappear. So I take care of them when they silently zoom onto my nose though it's hard not to injure them while trying to be considerate.
 
I do enjoy our summers’ prolonged twilights, it’s cool and languid, and gone is the fierce heat of the day, the relentlessly haranguing sun placing this part of the earth in competition with Mars for the most scorched ground. At 9:30 PM you can read easily outside without additional light. But as I sit here, my feet tapping a rain dance in Morse code above my below neighbor Sonya’s head (Sonya has a bird feeder up again, do you think she’s suicidal?) there is a heron flying low over the water, back and forth, boisterously cronking as it moves in turn to rest on each of the 3 deadfalls that stretch into the water. Several times today I heard an especially large splash and turned to see a red tailed hawk rising skyward with a fish in his claws. We have salmon in the inlet but these were not that big, though they do gleam silvery when they flip over at the surface to swim down into the darker green. They might be smelt? Such an unfortunate name. “Hi, I’m George.” “Hi, I’m Smelt.” “Well, yes you do but what’s your name?” So awkward at parties, I’m sure. Or at school!