skinks, snakes, damselflies, and desperation

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Last year, we had a skink living under our front walkway. It had a chevroned scale pattern and was an irridescent blue/green.
This year, we have a garden snake living under the outside steps. I wonder if it ate the skink. Do snakes eat skinks?
Meanwhile, the air is rife with damselflies, wings like chiffon and cut velvet. They follow me as I trudge out to the vegetable garden that is capitulating to various bugs and diseases. They alight on what’s left of the tall tomato plants, of which some large animal has chewed off the tops. ( I figure it’s the deer; they tend to wander pretty close to the house.) A green darner floats by. It’s so humid that everything is moving in slow motion.
I meander among the failing stalks; the damselflies circle my head, annoyed at having their rest disturbed. “Another F**king Learning Experience,” I think to myself. It never occurred to me to space out the plantings in terms of time so that all of the lettuce, for example, isn’t ready for picking all at once. I wonder if I bought tomoto plants that already had some kind of blight. We should have put up a fence to keep out the critters of all sizes. I should have sprayed it all with something more effective. Bleh. This whole summer’s blighted anyway.
Why not! The whole planet is in afflicted with various kinds of BushBlight anyway. As non-blogger myrln says:

Don’t be surprised if Dumbya ultimately blames the flooding rains in D.C. and environs on Al Gore for encouraging global warming to strike.

I sat with my mother tonight while we watched four hours of Lifetime movies. I did learn one thing from one of them: an aspen grove is the largest living organism on this planet; the trees in the gorve all are part of the same root system.
As this site explains:

Perhaps the most interesting thing about aspens is that each grove is actually a single organism, a clone. When a hillside becomes available for colonization a single tree will send roots and runners across the entire available area. This is why all the trees in one grove are nearly identical in size. They are sisters of an age and acting as a single organism. In the spring, each grove leafs out at a slightly different time than its neighbors. In the fall, each turns color as a unit. As the grove matures and dies, all its members give up the ghost collectively. The largest organism in the world is considered to be an aspen grove in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains.

As you must have noticed, I’m trying out some of Mandarin Meg’s design tips. Her brilliance is still alive and inspiring, even though she no longer is.

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