The beginning of the week’s cloudy skies were a relief from unrelenting sun. Then I found out there were no clouds, only smoke from Canadian wildfires. Yikes! That cannot be good. We were coughing and sneezing and, at first, blamed seasonal allergies.

The natural world never ceases to amaze. I heard my first cicadas. They usually start “singing” six weeks before summer ends.

Every year about this time, both phlox and monarda leaves develop an unattractive mold. It’s usually a result of dry soil and moisture in the air. I confess, I don’t do anything to remedy the problem. Some strategic snipping helps visually. The books say to wash the leaves with a baking soda solution. Right? I might ever get around to that!

I’m now harvesting in the vegetable gardens from memory. The weeds have won the war. Remarkably, there still is pickable food. My garden is a grid of beds into which I never need to step. I put black plastic weed mat on the paths. Every place there is a weed mat staple, a weed comes up the tiny holes. This brings me to a warning about staples. By the second year they are completely rusted. Kneeling on one of them would send a person to the ER for a tetanus shot. Watch where your knees or barefeet go!

While I was sitting on a bucket trying to make sense of a bed, a bunny came along and startled both of us. He took off, staying on the weed mat path turning every right angle. Guess he’s right at home!

In another garden-related animal news, I have a very old rusted cast iron teapot as yard art. Recently, I took off the lid and discovered a mouse nest. It must have entered through the inch-wide spout. Talk about cozy and safe!

In the perennial bed, the Shasta daisies have seen better days. They need to be dead headed. By that I mean cut right to the ground. They will not flower again this summer, but the foliage at ground level will come back green and very nice.

It’s time for a freshening up in the perennials. Dead sticks and leaves need to come out of the daylilies, annuals could all benefit from the removal of spent flowers and even a quick edge put around to define the bed from the lawn.

I’m a huge fan of the blue chicory blooming right now in wild meadows and in tiny cracks in pavement. There are so few blue summer flowers that come back yearly.

I’m so steamed about the paving of Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden and the proposed $200 million gold ballroom. There are so few words to even start with my disdain of the present government that I should rely on some old history. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House. Ronald Reagan promptly removed them. Before the present one, he was the worst president. He is still sainted by the Republican Party. He cut the tax rate for the rich, killed the unions, called students freeloaders and changed school grants to loans. He famously derided “welfare queens” and tried to privatize much in the government.

Ramsay MacMullen of Yale University described the Fall of Rome in just three words: “Fewer Had More.”