the Swallowtail.

Every Summer, the Swallowtail caterpillar plows through entire harvests of dill. I have not one year seen my Mom and Grandma's gardens escape their presence.

This year, I planted an unusually large amount of herbs, and my patch of dill was a large portion of my herb garden. Within a few weeks of the time I planted my seeds, my garden was full of them.



They would grow fat with bellies full of dill, then one day disappear. A few days later tiny baby swallowtail caterpillars would be in their place...sometimes as many as 15.


Michael's little brother spent a good amount of the Summer with us, and one night, Michael and him devised a plan only two 16 year old boys could come up with. $20 would be paid to his brother if he ate one of my caterpillars.

"Why not? It's $20."

I tried everything. I begged, lied, told him they were acidic and warned him against the foul odor they spray when predators come around. That last part wasn't a lie...but I did tell him that they taste like bile and sour dill.



They probably do.


The reason I finally gave him was the one I gave Michael when he told me to get rid of them, and how they were pests to my garden.
One day, they will wake up and not be these little dill-destroying creatures. They will be worth more than $20.



The evening before his brother left to go back home, I was outside, picking the last of my herbs for the season. Trapped inside the tomato and strawberry cage was a little something I called him outside to see.



It was one of our little swallowtail caterpillars, all grown up.

To see this transformation happen within two weeks is breath taking. And I knew there was a reason why this year, I planted enough dill for the two of us.

This is the Black Swallowtail...our Oklahoma State Butterfly. It's a huge part of what I saw growing up here, and to me...that is worth more than all the $20 bills in the world.

Swallowtail - The Oklahoma butterfly from Aura on Vimeo.

song is "Ripe" - Givers.


...

Thanks for the weather encouragement and teething tips, friends. Last night, a few hours after I posted, we got our rain.

The long, hot days of an Oklahoma Summer.

This Summer has been abnormally hot, even for our scorching Oklahoma Summers. When June came around, our temperatures reached the 100's and have stayed that way. There seems to be no end in sight, and every week we watch the weather, disappointed by another 7 days of triple digit temperatures and no rain in sight. We are in the middle of a severe drought, and the days seem to drag on with no relief.
At any given time, the weather here seems to be an indicator that the world is ending, when in reality, it is just a typical Oklahoma weather pattern.



Even our watering holes prove no relief, only feeling like a disappointing tepid bath. One that makes your skin almost feel worse than it did before.



We are all suffering from severe cabin fever, and feeling the need to spread our wings and be part of the outside world again. Days are spent trapped inside our house with the air conditioner on constantly, barely clothed, and sweating. Sweet Elodie seems to be taking it the worst. She loves nothing more than being outside - I adore that first moment when I take her out and she sighs, blinks her eyes, and takes in all the smells, sounds, and happy bits of nature. But these days she is stuck inside with the rest of us, and also teething. She cries, cries, cries...chews on frozen pacifiers and her little fingers. I want desperately to let her feel the wind on her skin and through her hair....I miss it, too.



We keep her busy the best we can, but there is only so much you can do with a (almost) 4 month old that just wants to sit in the hammock and swing, listening to the birds.



I try to rattle toys at her, but everything seems to make her cry. I make her promises of Fall, and how we will hike, go for walks, and lay in the hammock until she falls asleep and drifts off to another place.



The time inside has been a nice break to spend with family, and rest. But as the days go by and I see more and more of her personality come through, I realize how much of the two of us is inside her tiny body.



She is a whole mess of bored & sensitive, and a combination of her screams and this heat have been making my head very heavy.

We still have 2 more full months of hot weather, and for now I have to focus on the day to day. Looking ahead, it seems like a lifetime away before I can open the windows and let the stale out of this home that feels like a prison.





When she is in bed and my world is quiet again, I grab the monitor and sneak outside to unwind. The evening is the only time of day that is somewhat bearable, although the upper 90's are not much of a relief from this overbearing weight of Summer.
I take photos, pull weeds, and sadly look over a garden that stood no chance against the kind of Summer we had this year.



In late July, a Summer Breeze in Oklahoma is nothing like the ones that cool us to our bones in Spring. Now they feel heavy, thick, like a brick across your face. It feels like opening an oven, and being met with a wall of heat.

My herbs have long ago dried up, and what I didn't save to dry myself for the cooler months, I let go to seed. I have been outside in these hot evenings, picking them to prepare for gardening season, next Spring.






The way you feel after spending a couple hours outside in this weather can only be truly understood if you have spent a Summer here, in the middle of arid Oklahoma.
After a period of time, it almost feels like death. Your body is only brought back to reality by the beads of sweat that slowly trickle down your back, reminding you that you are still alive. Everything slows down, and even your senses are completely numb. Things seem to move slower, the world is drowsier, your heart beats quieter.



Across the state, people are losing their lives, and our wildlife is completely threatened by this drought.



In a literal sense, everything is just cooking.



Every couple weeks, clouds will fill the sky and everyone is praying to their God that it will finally rain. But we are met with no response from anyone or thing upstairs, and the tiny drops that barely cover the tallest leaves quickly evaporate.



The only things thriving are the sunflowers. My wildflower garden has dried up, but the sunflowers seem to be loving this heat.



Their faces are an absolute joy, a mirror image of the hot sun that is causing all of this trouble. But still they make me happy, to know that something is still able to live through this.





I've been clipping them and bringing them inside, my tiny bits of the outdoors inside of this air-conditioned-prison.
I've also been bringing inside handfuls of tomatoes from the garden...they are the only other remaining things that have survived.



But as of last week, this spider has made it's home in the middle of my three tomato plants, and I doubt that I will be in the middle of her web, picking my fruit any longer.




How challenging it really is... to stay optimistic and alive when everything around you is dying.
In these moments - the end of our icy Winters and the long, hot days of an Oklahoma Summer - it is a daily struggle and fight to put on a smile and face a world that is doing everything it can to break you down.



In these weak moments I think of sweet Elodie. Tiny, teething, sensitive, and innocent. Her first Summer has been a challenging one....and I wish that I could make it all better for her. For myself. But in real life, things don't work that way.

So today, and tomorrow, and for as long as that 7 day forecast spells 106 + no precipitation, I will smile and teach Elodie that sometimes we cannot control what goes on around us. The hand we are dealt may not be the best, but it's the only one we have.
In our home we are dreaming of the brisk days of Fall, open windows, and new life. Long walks, bike rides, and patio nights. Throwing more wood on the chiminea fire, swinging in the hammock, and a barren weight of Summer '11 to be lifted from our weary shoulders.

We will take it one day at a time, and one day we will wake up and these dreams will be today. Until then, all we can do is wait.

The wind comes sweeping down the plain... (part 2)

Yesterday was a normal, hot, Oklahoma-Summer kind of day. The temperature hit 100 degrees and Elodie and I stayed in most of the day, under the air conditioning on the couch. In the evening the temperature started to cool down and it was like it was Spring again. Clouds covered the sky and we laid in the hammock until her cheeks turned pink.

When I came inside to start dinner, I heard thunder, and already in my head, I was excited about our evening. Michael would be home from work at 7:30, dinner would be ready, Elodie would be bathed and in bed, and we would have a date night - backed by the sound of one of our sweet Summer thunderstorms.

I went outside to take video of the storm coming in. The clouds whirled in a sea of gray and the family of grackles - Mama & Papa bird, and their three babies chattered in the Bradford Pear tree behind our house. I took video of them, dancing, whistling, singing. I have been taping them for the last few weeks. Leaving the shelter of their home, black silhouettes against our beautiful sky.

Twenty minutes after Michael got home, the wind started to tear through the sky and we lost power. The house went dark, my music turned off, and the stove turned cold.

And then the most powerful storm I have ever been in ripped through our neighborhood and took everything in it's path. For half an hour, hail almost the size of tennis balls, 85 mile per hour winds, and heavy rain poured down onto our house. I have lived in Oklahoma my entire life, been in hundreds of tornado warnings and never once have I seen anything like it. Our trees bent and snapped, our window screens were bent and ripped from the frames, and I couldn't do anything but stand in the window, videotaping and watching something so powerful that I had absolutely no control of.

When it was over, we went outside to see what had happened to our little yard and house.



Outside, we found the shredded remains of the plants and flowers I spent the last few months nurturing. Our willow tree lost almost all it's branches, and there was a fence in our yard that did not belong to us, or any of our neighbors.







The wind picked up again, and the storm was coming back. Originally it had come from the North and destroyed our back yard. This time we felt it coming from the South, and we ran back inside before the second round of hail, high winds, and rain came through and did more damage.

When it was over, the sun started to come out and the air was still and calm. There was still rain falling, big glassy beads shining in the sunshine.













Other than crushed shutters, downed fences, ripped screens, and this hole in our house, we got lucky. Our neighbor lost a few windows from the huge hail, and their house flooded.



Most of our damage came to our little yard...my gardens.



I walked through the yard with a sad feeling in the pit of my stomach. My sunflower garden laid destroyed, before it ever had a chance to bloom into a field of yellow.



My saddest discovery came with the realization that most of the giant Bradford Pear was gone. The sweet Spring blooms I clip to bring inside, the flat green plates it formed in the Summer, that burned bright and red by Fall. And the family of grackles.

Mama and Papa bird were flying frantically from tree to tree, circling our street looking for their babies.
I held E a little bit tighter and felt an overwhelming guilt for so strongly mourning a patch of lost sunflowers.



When night rolled around and our power still wasn't back on, we packed up with flashlights and headed to my parents house.

I thought about our June 14th storm. Living in a state with storms so strong that 35,000 homes were left without power. Just like the song says, every Spring and Summer, wind, hail, tornadoes, and rain sweep down our plains and leave destruction. And every year, like a haunting reminder, we realize that we are part of something bigger than our every day.

The world keeps spinning, the grackles will have a new brood of babies, and even my sunflower patch will grow back, next Summer.

Today, I am thankful for our health, insurance, and weather so bad, that the good seems that much sweeter.




Also read: Where the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plain - May 2010

A day outdoors.

These photos were taken 3 weekends ago, when I was 18 weeks pregnant. It's amazing to see how much I am growing and changing in just a few short weeks.

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday weekend. I spent the night of my birthday (Saturday) feeling a bit sick, and the rest of the weekend both Michael and I puked our guts out. Thanks to a nasty stomach bug, I went 24 hours without any food or liquid and barely escaped having to get IV's for dehydration. Fortunately, last night my sister-in-law came over and saved the day with some of her nurse care and today I am feeling much more like myself. I went for a long walk this morning and got some much-needed fresh air.
I hate being sick and feeling sorry for myself, but when there is a little baby involved in the process, it makes me feel ten times worse. All I could think about was if she had an upset stomach, too.

We bought our crib this weekend, and Michael's parents are picking it up with a truck and bringing it in a few hours. We didn't expect to have to put the nursery together so quickly, but when we found the crib of my dreams (the very last one, floor model) for $200 off, we snatched it up. Putting this little room together has been so exciting and fun for me. I can't wait to show you all the finished project.

As always, thank you all for your thoughtful comments on the last post. For some reason I always pictured myself with a house full of boys and pockets full of rocks and toads. A baby girl might be just what I need as a little partner in crime for all my gardening, sewing, and cooking.
Happy Monday, lovelies.