4:45 p.m., 75F, a thin layer of clouds

There is so much left to do at the end of the day on Sunday, but still I cannot stand to be inside when it’s 75 out and there’s a thin layer of clouds, and just a few hours left before sundown. I bike to the Good Samaritan Hospital parking structure and lock up my bike, pull on my permethrin-treated pants and shirt as mourning doves coo. For a moment I am ten again, listening to the sound of doves without knowing at that age what they were, but knowing, that is the sound of summer, watching the sky to see if it would rain. Buckthorn fruits are developing on the shrub that overhangs the bench. A carved stone on the ground reads, “Celebrate a moment of meditation with Big Jer. Find your spirit. Share your passion this blessed day. In memory of Jerry Sellers.”

Cottonwood fluff piles up against the bases of trees and the edges of exposed roots, floats in the middle of the trail like a child’s craft cloud of stretched cotton balls. The berm crossing the trail is a forest of wild garlic about to flower, shoots as long as my middle finger, some a third again as long. Ash seedlings are blistered with mite galls. A spindly, hairy wood sorrel nearly a foot tall has a single flower at the tip. Further along, the forest is lit up with wild garlic plants, each tipped with a bright spathe that is roiling with flowers waiting to emerge.

House wrens are calling from the yards backed up to the forest. A robin clatters through the brush beside me, babbling loudly. I take the walk north through the forest, distracted, not paying attention to much, waist-high in sunflowers as great-crested flycatcher sirens go off intermittently in the canopy and indigo buntings sing repeated descending notes. The poke milkweed I noticed a few weeks ago bears an umbel of floral buds from each leaf node.

I walk down to the marsh. Red-winged blackbirds are calling and multiflora rose is in full bloom, practically choking out the shrubs adjoining the water. River bulrush is barely taller than the boardwalk, but in full flower. Spike-rushes are blooming. A wood duck squeals as it flies away over the open water. Swamp sparrows chip in the marsh, common yellowthroats whistle their three-beat song, red-winged blackbirds call and stare me down. A warbling vireo sings a sustained, exuberant song from deep within the brush. A deadly nightshade is in flower. Carex granularis, Carex annectens, and fowl manna grass are all setting seed.

An entire slough of reed canary grass is in flower. Spittle bugs hang gummy on every stem. I squeeze one off of its stem, separate off the spittle, and the big is dark on the back and sides, very distinctive. iNaturalist tells me it is a diamond-back spittlebug, a generalist. Bulrush is flowering. Gray dogwood is flowering. Hawkweed is about to flower. A Hill’s oak hangs onto bouquets of frost-seared leaves.

Halfway up the hill into the woods, on a west-facing slope, a sun-exposed cluster of wild garlic are coming into full bloom. Every second or third plant holds a single flower up to the sun, bulblets crowded around its base. This the future: a few days hence, all the wild garlic will look the same. The shoots coming off their inflorescence bulblets extend to six inches or longer. Embedded among the onions is a large clump of Carex tenera with inflorescences arching. Two steps further along the trail, there is a patch of sanicles in full flower, bristling with stamens. One has a single spittlebug adult on it, wings over its back like a cape, perched for action; and some other insect dragging a plume of cotton behind it. They are wary. I touch the cottony one thinking it will be docile, dragged down by the waxy exudate, but it jumps away. I touch the spittlebug, and it disappears into the woods.

A female mallard walks ahead of me up the trail, waddling, looking over her shoulder a little nervously and then flies off. A cream violet is blooming, a tall stemmed thing. Lanky annual fleabanes are flowering everywhere they can get a toe into the ground. The goldenrods along the trail are all globbed with spittle. I take one messy cluster my fingers and it resolves into two spittlebug larvae who immediately begin exploring my hand in opposite directions. They appear also to be diamond-back spittlebugs, the same I found on the reed canary grass in the marsh, though here we are in the shade of the oak forest. They pump their abdomens intermittently as they walk, which I at first I suspect is to extrude foam, but it doesn’t seem to have that effect. They walk, each in its own direction, stop to pump their abdomens, go on. After five minutes of nothing more than this I grow a little impatient, so I put them back on a goldenrod on walk on.

A wood pewee calls. Red clover is blooming. I cross the trail and find a patch of Atlantic camas in fruit, seeds still pulpy inside the rubbery capsules. A mosquito stings me while a great-crested flycatcher calls frantically from the adjacent forest. Golden Alexanders is flowering in the understory. Butterweed is lush in the shady understory. The forest opens up toward the marsh, and daisies are flowering. The forest gives way; a privet is flowering at the top of the hill. Swamp sparrows and song sparrows are singing in the cattails. Glossy buckthorn is blooming. Yellow sweet clover and black medick are flowering along the trail, typical weeds.

Back in the forest, honewort is in bloom, along with a thicket of goutweed. It is 6pm, and a wood thrush starts singing. Or perhaps it has been singing, only I haven’t been there to hear it. The wild iris is flowering, and Carex sparganioides is fruiting. I walk out, sit back at Jerry’s bench to pull off my permethrin outer layer, and head home for supper.