Dog days

We’re approaching the Dog Days, a season for wearing shades while relaxing on the chaise, a time when kids sell lemonade to the community and community bands hold free concerts.

You know it’s high summertime when it seems like you’re always finding such things as strawberry seeds or bits of sweet corn in your teeth.

But this is what we longed for during our long, bleak winter. This is why we endured those eight — no, 10 — months of jaw-clenching cold, clinging to our garden catalogues, staring at the tomato photos in the wan wintertime light and mumbling to ourselves, “By gee, if I manage to live through this, I’ll never take summer for granted again.”

And here it is, summertime, and we’re taking it for granted.

This is largely due to our overscheduled lives. Summer means running here to do this or dashing there to do that. Does anyone know what time it is? Half past summer, that’s what.

Kids aren’t allowed to enjoy summer anymore; they are instead sent off to camps to have their heads stuffed with highly specialized skills. There are knitting camps and piccolo camps and camps where kids learn about rutabagas. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there are even camps where kids learn about camps.

It won’t be long before we’ll be sending kids off to camps where they will be instructed on how to be kids. Wake up, people. Being a kid is something that should come as naturally as a dog taking a catnap.

Perhaps one of the best things about summertime is the wide range of aromas. Taking your daily constitutional in the winter is like strolling through the scent environment of a walk-in freezer.

Summertime presents the perambulator with a palette of perfumes that varies from day to day, even from one discreet area to the next.

For instance, one might pass a pollinating corn field and be assaulted by the aroma of millions of corn plants making whoopee. Stroll a short way farther, and you may detect a swampy tang wafting from a clump of roadside cattails.

And then there are the fauna and the fowl. During my walks, I often see a pair of American kestrels. These elfin falcons might be small, but their steely stares convey the message, “Don’t let my size fool you. I don’t take any crap from anybody.”

It’s fun to watch them watch me from their powerline perch, safe in the supposition that I’m too large for even the hungriest and most ambitious kestrel. I’ll sometimes see them hovering, hummingbird-like, over a specific spot. This means that it might soon be lunchtime for the kestrel.

I have somehow absorbed the fact that kestrels can see in ultraviolet. This is one of those nuggets of knowledge that has proven totally useless up until this very moment.

Anyhow, it seems that mouse and vole urine is visible in ultraviolet. Using their Superman-like visual abilities, kestrels can determine where their prospective lunch has been goofing off and leaving a mess. This is yet another example of Nature’s endlessly escalating measures and countermeasures, one that can only culminate with the deployment of tiny porta-potties by the mice and voles.

After my walk, my feet inevitably take me to our garden, which has turned out to be embarrassingly successful.

The advent of the Dog Days is when gardens are at their peak. Our garden has become a jumbled jungle that contains a prodigious plethora of pulchritudinous produce.

Who ordered all these tomatoes? We’ll have to call the folks who make Heinz catsup (or is it ketchup?) if we hope to keep all these ‘maters from going to waste.

Then, there’s the sweet corn. I enjoy fresh sweet corn as much as the next guy, but we’ll soon have sweet corn coming out of our ears. This doesn’t sound like a very comfortable proposition.

Speaking of comfort, the Dog Days are traditionally the hottest days of the year, a time for languid torpor. After all, it’s summertime, and the living is easy.

After tending the garden, I often do what any good dog would do — that is, hunt for a cool, shady spot. Reclining on my chaise in the shade, I’ll sip something cold and refreshing and might even sneak in a short nap. Imagine that. Sleeping outdoors. This was unthinkable a few short months ago and will be again in another little while.

My wife lets me be at such times so I can go chasing rabbits in my dreams. Because every dog has his day, and my wife knows enough to let a sleeping dog lie.

Jerry Nelson is a recovering dairy farmer from Volga, South Dakota. He and his wife, Julie, have two sons and live on the farm where Jerry’s great-grandfather homesteaded over 110 years ago. Feel free to email him at jerry.n@dairystar.com.