Summer is a time for new life, and each year I learn to see more and more of it as it emerges all around me.

A few weeks ago, I was clipping dill from my garden into a salad, and I saw a “bug”–because I’d seen a swallowtail laying eggs on queen anne’s lace a few years ago, and observed it through all the stages from egg to butterfly, I recognized this little bug as a tiny swallowtail caterpillar. I fed it more dill, and some fennel and queen anne’s lace, and the day before yesterday, it emergd from its chrysalis as a beautiful black swallowtail!

I’ve put up a wren house for several years now, and this year, for the first time, a pair of wrens made a nest in it and raised babies. I never saw them, but I often heard them peeping inside the birdhouse. I’ve enjoyed watching the parents’ frequent comings and goings, and then today, noting the absence of such activity (and no peeping), I looked inside and saw an empty nest. Those birds know what they’re doing–how to keep attention away from the fledglings as they first learn to fly!