I love sitting out in my backyard. There are so many things to enjoy there.  For weeks I’ve had to cut down on that because of the intense heat. My son’s dog, Andy, likes to accompany me out there but this morning we had to come back inside because it started to rain a little.  

One thing I like to do is spot planes. There are jets going in many directions to Newark airport, Teterboro, and to Newburgh. There are so many that I suspect some also may be headed for Long Island.  When Andy was younger he would bark at them, believing he was keeping them from landing in our backyard. Why I feel compelled to keep track of them  is a silly mystery. There are also helicopters doing traffic reports.  

And then there’s the birds. Everything from Mourning Doves to hawks, blue jays, cardinals, wrens, crows, and starlings fighting over the bird seed in my feeders. Tall sprigs of grass have been shooting up on the lawn. Mike solved the mystery of where they were coming from. Since none was being planted in those patches, he realized that birds were dropping seeds from the bird feeders. So they were the planters.  

Besides hydrangea  bushes I have some beautiful pink flowering bushes with trumpet shaped blossoms that my neighbors must have planted by our common fence, and I am reaping the benefit of as most of them are growing on my side. I do share some wild roses that grow on my side, with her and some of my other neighbors also.  I guess these roses don’t respond well to heat and rain because there is a lack of many of them this year. My friend Gail comes by on her birthday every year as that’s when my roses choose to bloom which is in the month of June. This year there were zero for poor Gail.  

I like the quiet of my backyard but I also enjoy certain sounds. Besides the songbirds, I like to hear the sound of the train going through town which is over a mile from here. And then there’s a few church bells that strike on the hour. First there’s chimes which prepare us for the time strikes which I carefully count.  When the weather is cooler, I often sit on a bench to rest before returning on my walk back home. A man walking by told me that it looked like I was waiting for a bus. His buddy apologized for what he interpreted  as rudeness. I assured them both that I was a big joker myself so no need to apologize. I told them that I was instead waiting to be picked up by a plane and I could even point out which one was about to land  since I was in the process of jet watching. 

When my son is here, I would often make fun of him, running to the street when he heard an ambulance or a fire truck approaching. Some lawyers are accused of being ambulance chasers (trying to represent clients who may have gotten hurt in an accident). But Michael is not a lawyer or a fireman. I have stopped making fun of him ever since he helped a young boy out of the back seat of a car his grandmother was driving and had hit a tree. The grandmother couldn’t speak English and the boy couldn’t speak or understand Italian.  Mike only speaks English but it was obvious what needed to be done. The owners of the house where the tree was had already called for an ambulance. Mike gave the little boy his cell phone so he could call his mother. That was also a big deal  for the boy and his grandmother.  Since all this was going on just a block away from my house, I walked there and witnessed the whole thing. No one was hurt badly.