Dinner in the Garden

 

I was not on campus today, but I do enjoy the waves of fragrant bushes and trees there. The crabapples and lilacs have long since bloomed, but right now the catalpas and Japanese lilacs are in full, aromatic bloom. Kathbert doesn't like to call the Japanese lilacs anything with "lilac" in the name, even though we could see from the leaves that they are closely related to the purple shrubby lilacs, because they smell very different. They are trees with yellowish-white blossom clusters, and she prefers to think of them as "poofy trees." It's like how carob is delicious if you're expecting carob, but it's a horrible surprise if you're expecting chocolate. Even the tulip tree blossoms have a faint scent reminiscent of other magnolias, as I discovered when I picked up the fallen blossoms. They are too far up in the trees for much scent to get down to a casual passerby, but if you can smell one up close, they're lovely.

Today I worked from home, which has its own charms. At lunch I went for a walk and was surprised to see a rather large, colorful bird fly by not much higher than my head. It had a bright yellow bill, a reddish-brown neck, and a dark green body, and I realized it was a green heron. Then I went to pray the rosary in the shady spot near the little bay, and on a log in the bay was another green heron, so maybe the first one got chased off: "This is MY spot!!" It watched me leerily as I walked around in the shade, praying, and then it vanished. Maybe that was because there was now a black-crowned night heron standing in the bay. Who knew there would be such good birdwatching in the heat of the day?

This evening I weeded in the garden, then Travalon joined me for a community dinner at the garden. They used to have pizza made right there in their ovens, but of course during the pandemic they had nothing, and now it's different groups. Tonight they had garden strata and pesto pasta salad, and you donated as much as you wanted. Then when we got home, there was live music at Mariner's, a man and a woman singing and playing acoustic guitar, so we went over to sit outside and listen to them. The waiter asked what I would like to drink, and I said a Skinny Island Girl, since they made a delicious one at the sadly defunct Nau-Ti-Gal. The waiter didn't know what that was, so I found a recipe: vodka, unsweetened cranberry juice, lime juice, stevia syrup, and diet ginger ale. He said, "I have regular cranberry juice, simple syrup, and regular ginger ale," so it was a basic Island Girl... and a lot more calories, as I found out when I entered it into my diet app tonight. Maybe I should have just had that ice cream drink I really wanted...

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