Out at Night

We have been enjoying sitting on our front porch in the evening, on cooler nights. We burn a cintronella candle and listen to the cicadas and tree frogs for a while. Back in the spring we bought some moonflower seeds and planted them in a pot. Wild green vines have grown all over a trellis and string until we thought they would never bloom, but earlier this week, we got our first flower. The blooms open in late afternoon and last only one night. This one opened this evening.

Another creature that is busy around the porch these days is the hummingbird- or several. Some stand guard and chase others off; hummers are really small terrorists in that they run off almost anything. They even buzz Norm when he goes out to change their sugar water! I caught this female sipping early this evening while the male was around back guarding the other feeder for a while. I'll try to get a better picture in coming days, but these little buzzers are quick.

Earlier today we met with the Compton Heights Christian Church Reading Circle at a coffee house called 6 North, in the Central West End of St. Louis. Our book this month was Tortilla Curtain by T. C Boyle. It was the first book by this author that either of us had read. It concerns two couples, one well-off and the other barely surviving, showing the contrasts between people who have fled Los Angeles for a "safer" life in one of the canyons and people who risk everything to enter this country in hopes of making a living. Now that illegal immigration is a hot political topic, this novel made for timely reading. It doesn't offer any easy answers but it does what all good fiction does: it puts a human face on the abstractions that we would prefer to ignore.