After dark

I’ve lived in New England for decades, but there are two things that will never seem natural to me: how early it gets dark here in winter, and the lack of a proper spring.

Since the time change, it’s dark when I walk Roxy after dinner. She has a light on her collar, and I carry a flashlight, but we are regularly startled by other walkers who dress in somber colors and don’t carry a light, their forms materializing out of the darkness like solid ghosts.

Tonight, it started drizzling just as Roxy and I set out, and after we turned toward home, forked branches of lightning lit the sky, followed by rumbling thunder. Since when, I wondered, do we have thunderstorms in November?

As we approached the house, a flock of roosting turkeys gobbled en masse from the trees across the street, as unsettled by the thunder as I was. You never know what surprises lurk on suburban streets after dark.

 

After the storm

Yesterday morning, I photographed the latest addition to our backyard bald-faced hornets’ nest. In the days since I’d shown you this nest, the workers had added a floor and entryway on the bottom and some eyelid-style vents on the top, transforming what had been an open, bell-shaped structure into a covered, well-ventilated sphere.

And then came yesterday afternoon’s torrential thunderstorm, which sheared off the outer layer of the nest, exposing its inner chamber.

All day today, the hornets have been working nonstop, some of them tending to the fat white larvae in their cells and others worrying over the outer edges of the nest’s papery surface, repairing it with individual mouthfuls of chewed wood fibers. It takes a while to build a paper wall if you’re moving one tiny mouthful at a time, but hornets (like bees) are tireless and resilient creatures. I have no doubt that within a week, if left undisturbed, these sister hornets will rebuild their nest as good as (or even better than) before.

 

Partly cloudy

We thought for sure the heavens would crack open with thunderstorms as we sat in Gillette Stadium watching the New England Revolution last night…and with the steamy weather we had all last week, I can’t say I would have minded. Instead, the rain held off and we were treated to a lovely panorama of partly cloudy sky.