Four Hopes

one I've been checking milkweed plants for monarch butterfly caterpillars my whole life. In my (un)professional life, the caterpillar search is useful as a diversion from weeding, which becomes really freakin' tedious somewhere around August 1st.

But monarch caterpillars aren't as plentiful as they were in my childhood. I didn't find one for years. With a bumper crop of butterflies this year, though, I was hopeful... and hope paid off.

Check out this plump specimen! The best thing about it, besides being striped and wrinkly, is: Which end is up? I think it's the left end, but maybe it's the right end.

two So you get to hoping for a thing, like say a fairy ring, and there you are, speeding through the countryside on the way back from a hike. Your boyfriend is presenting the outlook on your combined finances for the next twelve months. Somewhere just past the good news that "we ought to scrape by, plus drink really good beer," he looks out the window and says all casual, "hey, there's a fairy ring of puffballs."

Well, I'll be. So there is.

One theory on what a fairy ring is this, from Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora: "When there is an even distribution of nutrients in the environment, the mycelium of a terrestrial fungus may grow outward at the same rate in all directions, periodically producing circles of mushrooms on its outer fringes."

Another theory is that fairies partied there, last night while you were sleeping.

three With such a good track record, I thought "hell, I'll hope for a garden spider," because I was afraid they'd gone extinct. And sure enough, my friends Rena and Mark of Prospect Street Gardens showed me one of their multiple greenhouse spiders, hanging out in the harvest.

four Summer doesn't afford me much time for reading, but some days I get in about five minutes of Found Magazine, a collection of sad-hysterical-dark-and-dirty found photos, letters, etcetera. I read one night that if you send Found any money you find, they'll use it to mail their magazines to prisoners, which I thought was pretty cool. So I hoped to find some money.

Two mornings later, what did I find on our dog walk? Six bucks! Usually it's Laika, the dog, who finds good things on the ground on our dog walk. She wasn't interested in the cash because it didn't have anything brown and maggoty smeared on it that she could scarf down in a millisecond. I stepped over it on the way out, figuring I'd give anyone lurking in the bushes a chance to reclaim the part of the drug deal that got dropped on the ground. But I picked it up on the way back.