I am mostly just trolling my wife with the title of this missive.
I did not adopt a cat.
Adopting a real, furry, mammal cat is grounds for divorce in our house.
I adopted a caterpillar.
In fact, I adopted three.
Each summer, this year later than others, I accidentally hurt or remove a milkweed that has a monarch caterpillar egg on it, or a very small caterpillar. A caterpillar so small it can’t be removed. So I bring the stem into the house and place it in water until it’s time to take it outside for the rest of its life.
Earlier in the week, in the blazing hot temps but before the hazy skies, I accidentally knocked two plans and brought them inside.
I try really hard when I am outside to be kind and caring to milkweed and the egg or caterpillar-stage monarchs that live on them. The milkweed, as with each year, are abundant and in the least convenient places ever.
I’ve been weeding the garden around the house. This is a garden the dog and I walk through, and brush against, all the time. It doesn’t have a form yet and there are milkweeds in walkways and pathways. In clearing out all the weeds, I came across one milkweed after the other. I’d flip the stem around in my finger looking for an egg or a cat. If I find one, I leave it. (Even though I know there’s a good chance a cat will get knocked off, or build a chrysalis in a place that I will accidentally knock over. But, to be honest, the last years I brought caterpillars or eggs inside to hatch so many had OE and didn’t make it…leaving them outside in nature feels better.)
Would you like to see one up close? You can! Because there was a slightly bigger caterpillar about 12 inches away.
These two pals get to hang outside. But sometimes I have to bring stems inside. Are plants with eggs or live caterpillars (and their poop) on the kitchen counter a good idea?
Of course not! But we don’t have a lot of counter space and honestly if I put things anywhere other than the kitchen counter I will forget about them.
I thought I was bringing in two plants with an egg a piece. But I was actually bringing in three caterpillars. And I almost gasped when I saw how large this caterpillar was. The grow quickly, and the size of their milkweed-fed poops grow just as fast too.
It just seemed too hot to transplant the caterpillars outside to live milkweed during this 90+ degree week. So I waited until things cooled just a little, and carried the two jars out to the showy milkweed in the rain garden. (The very, very dry rain garden.)
I try to arrange the chewed-through stem woven into a new young plant and hope the cats make the jump.
It was just a short term adoption!
Thursday the Canadian (and northern Minnesotan) smoke blew in. Early Thursday morning I thought it was a heavy haze. Maybe left over from the neighbor burning in our valley the evening before.
But it didn’t take long to realize this was something more than our neighborhood. That the upper Midwest and parts of the east are blanketed in this smoky haze.
The temperatures were in the 90s. The air was hot and still and smoky and we tossed the word ‘apocalyptic’ around all afternoon.
We’ve had Canadian wildfire blow through (stand still) before. This round felt more pungent, thicker, just smelled smokier.
The visual haze seemed worse than what I’d remembered before too. From the back porch, during the worst of it, I could hardly see the row of trees at the end of the field. And there’s a whole row of hills in the back of the frame below that are entirely hidden in this photo.
The air cleared a bit yesterday. The temperatures finally broke today. But the dirty air did come back So at least the feelings of the end of the world is a little paused. Or not as bad as last week.
I did (unintentionally) use the gross air quality of the day to clean and reorganize the basement, so that’s not nothing.
The red tailed hawks are perching on the round hay bales and hunting from them. The hawks get so much closer, and so still, on the hay bales than any other time. Some look quite young. I lose hours eyeing them through my scope.
That’s it for today. I hope you adopt something interesting. I hope you can see through the haze. I hope you can find beauty in your mistakes. (My mistake is letting all the dill re-seed. This photo is taken through the haze of the dill forest.)
💨vanessa
NO PROOFIES
SAME AS JENNIFER. No cat? Dangit.
Well you also trolled me because I clicked on the notification so fast in my excitement to meet the new furry family member 😂