Dad made the rounds on his riding mower, the single yard-maintenance task left to him.  He donned his straw hat and sprays his arms with SPF 100 sunscreen and vroomed rapidly around the yard, missing corners and spots here and there and not knowing or caring.  On his mower, he is master.  No driver license required.  No traffic rules.  He sat on the back patio, resting, after finishing the job, when a tiny Black-chinned Hummingbird zoomed across the yard but stopped and hovered one foot from Dad’s face, eyeing him closely, pointing a long sharp beak at him in an ambiguous manner, neither clearly malevolent nor benevolent, but clearly curious.  Then she veered away to land on the feeder and lick sugar water with a pink tongue through that long beak.  Did you know the Portuguese name for Hummingbird is Beija Flor, meaning Flower Kiss?  Appropriate and romantically sweet.  Dad found the up-close-and-personal hummingbird encounter endearing and exhilarating, and stumbled into the house to tell Mom and me.  Dad does not get to see the hummingbirds Mom and I are always heralding with “There she is!” since he cannot turn his head and stiff neck.  His encounter was thus all the more personal, far from routine.  Hummingbirds are a fascinating combination of aggression and cuteness, peevishness and beauty.  But Mom and Dad and I are just glad they have found us and keep coming.  Their olive-green wings seem drab until the sunlight catches them just right, revealing a jeweled florescence.  Three days later, a rotting stench filled the garage, and I remembered that Dad had mowed the lawn, leaving the grass to compress and putresce in the canvas mower bags.  Vile black liquid dripped from the bag bottoms like bile.  I steeled myself against a recurring gag and plastic-bagged the grass for disposal in the outside cans, where the grass will continue to rot in the hot sun for another five days before the garbage truck rescues us.  Driving off to the grocery store later, Dad ventured, “Hey, Rog, you can ride the electric shopping cart, too, if you want to!”  I tried to smile at this prospect that held no attraction for me whatsoever but that offered some insight into his initial lack of enthusiasm for the motor-assisted cart.  After parking, I finally responded: “I’ll be right back, Dad,” and ran into the store to commandeer a cart and scoot it out the store doors and across the parking lot to Dad’s car door.  “What did you think?”  I pretended not to hear as I rushed a push cart over to Mom.  But I think we found a new grocery store routine.

(Hummingbird image by Daniel Roberts from Pixabay.)

The spotted fawn in our back yard.