DINNER ON THE GROUNDS

"Sweet; unsweet; coke."

BOUSECHEEK

Too hot to keep chocolate; it runs all over. Every time I take a sip of mate it immediately comes dribbling out through my skin. At the botanical garden I was talking to Jophet by the cacao tree and couldn't believe the amount of brine coming out of me. I got sunburned from sitting & reading in total shade. The twisty red candle on the windowsill relaxed its shape and leaned itself curvily against the pencil-sharpener. I put icecubes in my lemonwater to cool it and they were gone in less than a minute. I put four more in; they were pea-sized a minute later when I went to drink.

Lenya and I were back and forth between Chişinău and Medea gathering our weathers to go south with my tocayo to fête Jophet, who awaited us – and her thirtieth birthday – in Tallapoosa. In one of those meantime evenings I rode bikes out the bay with some Chişinău friends to see if my uncle's schooner was coming in off the banks yet. It was. I'd spoken with Lenya that evening and we had a loose plan to find Jophet at dark and watch some bad films with him; leaving the sunset-glow of the pier toward that end I had the pleasure of encountering Ralu, whom I'd not met before but about whom I'd heard much from Lenya. Her sister took this photograph.

They were clumsy together. The three had shared a couple Augusts' worth of the intimacy of I want to know where this one is going.

Jophet is in Tallapoosa in joy of thirty-first birth & thirtieth cumplimiento. Her bicycle moves through the palpable heat like a flinder-mouse, finely awake to each synchronous valence. She navigates libraries with the grace and force of her years. Her succulents thrive. She can be reduced to no collection of details. Having ganged south to give love and hugs engendered perennially in them by her and having now ganged north again, her tribu already wants more such outlet!

Have you ever seen anything like that before in your whole entire life?

Harvest, Herbst, Κάρπος

Many species of Lycaenid, including our common Everes comyntas, are myrmecophilous in the larval stage – that is, their caterpillar-body will secrete sweet liquors tasty enough to ants to cause them to tend and protect the caterpillar much as a little frontier family would their milch cow. One species, however, complicates or upsets this image most compellingly. Far from settling for the peaceful model available to it as a Lycaenid, whereby it might live out its larval life transforming vegetable matter partly into butterflyward body mass and partly into a sugar-tithe for its protectors, Feniseca tarquinius chooses, inexplicably, fauna over flora as the fodder for its larval stage. Alone in this choice among all North American butterflies, the handsome caterpillar gobblingly ravages its way among the plump little bodies of the Wooly Aphid (Eriosomatinae): the larva of which, it should be noted – and there must be some kind of reason for this disturbing quasi-symmetry – is myrmecophilous.