Today is warm and lovely with a here and gone and back again sun and an occasional breeze. I filled all the bird feeders yesterday and hung another, a cylindrical feeder I had taken down when it was under a spawn attack. The chickadees came back first. I watched them from the kitchen window while the coffee brewed. They were quickly in and out of the feeders to nearby branches carrying sunflower seeds in their beaks. The little birds took two or three whacks before they got the meat.

My car is filled with empty boxes, newspapers and a bag of trash. Two more bags need to be loaded into the trunk, but I don’t feel like going to the dump today. I’m thinking late Sunday afternoon. Today I am a sloth.

When I was a kid, I was familiar with snakes, grasshoppers and assorted insects. I never saw animals in the woods near my house. I figure there had to be raccoons, spawns and maybe skunks but they kept a wide berth. When we took family rides, we sometimes saw cows, and the whole car got excited when we once saw a couple of deer eating grass near the road. My father stopped so we could watch. The deer ran away, but even that was amazing to see. I remember their back legs kicking in the air.

My nephew was ten when he came to stay a few days. We went camping at Nickerson State Park in Brewster with my friends and their six kids. One night a skunk waddled by the camp site. My nephew was so excited. He told us it was the first animal he’d ever seen in the wild. I think spawns were my first. I remember feeding them peanuts near the swan boats in the Boston Public Garden. I kept begging my father for more peanuts so he bought more from the vendors who sold small brown paper bags filled with peanuts, and he doled them out to the four of us. The squirrels, not yet called spawns, surrounded us and took the peanuts from our hands. I laughed the whole time. I loved feeding those squirrels, but I was a kid, what did I know about cute rodents?