Mosquitos. Is there anyone around Milwaukee who didn’t mutter that word last week? And more than once. And more than around Milwaukee, probably in the whole Midwest.
After all the rain, it was suddenly dry, and I had to water the garden. Someone had detached the sprinkler, and before I could reattach it, mosquitos drove me into the house. Still, an hour later I braved a walk to Atwater Park, strolled down the S-shaped path through mosquito clouds and overheard conversations, noted others’ mosquito mutterings, reveled in the osier, sumac, turkey foot grasses (which may not be turkey foot), New England asters, purple thistle, clusters of goldenrod, even in the hollyhocks. A friend, walking up as I walked down, said to me, “Isn’t it beautiful!”
Maybe she was referring to the weather, but I responded, “Yes, I love the plantings on the bluff,” and waved at the hodgepodge of color and the dragonflies hovering like mini-helicopters, and the red-winged blackbirds. One of them had ruffled my hair last month as it swooped past me, and of course I thought of Alfred Hitchcock.
“Some people want to bring native plants back to the bluff,” she said.
“What! This is the most beautiful spot in Shorewood! Why don’t they plant native plants in those clunky planters that they moved here from Oakland Avenue?” We both laughed at the ugliness of the flowers, carefully arranged to look artificial, that are standing like robots overlooking Atwater Beach.
The following day I repeated the conversation to a friend who replied, “When my wife saw those planters at Atwater Beach, she was so upset she wanted to roll them down the bluff!”
“Actually it’s possible. You can take the path all the way down without using any steps.”
“I know. I scoped it out.”
Well, we have a lot to mutter about, and we have a lot to admire. We should be glad that the bluff bursts willy-nilly with wildflowers, that the clunky planters are clumped together on the overlook and not on Oakland Avenue, and that maybe the mosquitos froze last night.
