It occurred to me this morning, sitting in the garden at the Rancho right after dawn, that the Rancho is the Dr. Who of summer houses. It just keeps regenerating. This is our seventh house in seventeen years. We don't change much (at least not to our own eyes) but the shell in which we're housed transforms mightily.

Anyway, in the current incarnation, a tremendous windstorm last night broke some branches off the biggest of the many black locusts in the yard. Early this morning the sky was blazing blue and cloudless but the wind was still so strong the birds were lying low. After awhile it calmed down and catbirds, a very bedraggled robin, and a woodpecker all came to breakfast on the grass, along with a rabbit. The garden is a disaster; lots of my plants got eaten, lots got smashed down or drowned in the constant rain this summer. Nevertheless, the butterfly bush, the butterfly weed, the bee balm, the lamb's ear, and the nasturtiums are flourishing. The purple verbena is doing okay, though not as enthusiastic as usual; same for the echinacea. The lantana is shellshocked but if it gets a couple of weeks of sun it could still come through. The heuchera, though, was a non-starter. And the garden has a couple of bare spots where moles so completely devoured what was there that I don't even remember what I planted.

The good news is, in the dogwood outside my writing porch, the robin has managed to produce four chicks, and I mean they're so tiny they must have hatched in the last two days. That she kept them all alive and in the nest through the storm last night -- and that the nest stayed in the tree -- is a tribute to her mothering and her nest-building talents. She exhausted herself flying back and forth feeding them; now she's in there sitting on them, to keep them warm and, I suspect, to shut them up. (Update, an hour later: papa robin has joined the worm-shuttle effort. Non-stop face-feeding going on.)