SEED DISPERSAL SYSTEMS

Great Lakes Diary 57

I returned from wetland Washington DC and found a Chicago autumn coming on.  The bored-shitless teen lifeguards have gone back to school, and the white buoys float way out there, forlorn. Swim at your own risk! The angle of the light on the rocks along the shore, and on the walls of my apartment, shifts and shines.  My office is in University Hall, and for a couple of weeks, the stenciled address, 1897, is projected large on the hall wall. 

At the lake, the catalpas bloomed and shed their popcornlike blossoms in the spring, then spread canopies of wide leaves all summer, and now they hang long string-bean seed pods, that generous tree.  The monarchs are migrating south, so the milkweed shuts up shop with their almost erotic pebbled bulbous seed pods, tufted.  Thistle, apple, cockle—from fruit to burr, all the plants are keen to disperse their seeds, and the squirrels are happy to help. The more savage prickly spurs stick to your socks and mat the dog’s pelt, whatever it takes to travel cheap in the off-season. The last blooming thing is the goldenrod, everywhere, and it doesn’t seem coincidence that I used to buy goldenrod writing tablets at back-to-school specials in September, when I was a kid.

Somebody thoughtful, or crazy, down at Addison and Lawndale, has hung a see-through plastic purse full of Lucky Charms, for lack of fruits and nuts for wildlife.  Magically delicious.

And all along the lake, there are the seats built into the sea walls and painted each spring by locals in a weekend festival just before Memorial Day.  They last a year and get painted over with a new set of artists, a new theme.  The theme this year was “cicada summer”.  The cicadas stayed on the south side.  That’s okay—look at all the dragonflies lingering into fall! 

Have a sit with the dog and think about the summer that was, because it was a pretty good summer.