Yard Critters & The One I Love

Another overcast day, another day with temperatures uncharacteristically low for Arizona. And the birds are loving it. The doves talk to us at dawn and dusk, so many woo-hoo-uh-hoo’s we can hardly stand it. They seem to strut their horny selves all day long, engaging in embarrassingly amorous couplings right in front of us and the world, and then at dusk they fly into our arbor vitae to perch for the night, their stiff wings sounding like snapped sheets as they settle down. The females build stick nests for their offspring, a bird too dumb to add a little fluff for the babies. The springtime mockingbird males sing their little hearts out hoping to woo a female. If you’ve never heard a mockingbird you’ve missed the whistling, warbling variety of their song. They sing only for a month and a half during mating season and then go silent for the rest of the year. We’ve had far fewer quail families in our yard this year. I guess, as with rabbits, nature decides to slow down the quantity for fear of upsetting the balance. Lord knows, if they didn’t slow down we’d eventually be up to our hips in quail and rabbits. Of course we just have to have a nutty woodpecker who drums on our roof turbines early in the morning, sort of like the cockadoodledoo rooster who wakes the world before the world is quite ready for awakening. Enough of birds. I’ve written before about the odd yellow swallowtail butterfly who’s taken up our yard.

He (or she) has been here for at least two months flying continuously in and around our fruit trees, swooping up and over our arbor vitae. Doesn’t he (or she) ever get tired? Even our monarchs don’t stay as long as this one has.

How about a really short review of a Netflix movie we saw last week? Our local Arizona critic, Bill Goodykoontz, gave us a list of ten movies of this year he thought didn’t get enough attention from the public. The One I Love, starring Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass, is a most unusual romady about a couple who visit a therapist (Ted Danson) because their marriage has gone a bit stale. The therapist suggests a weekend in the country at a lovely house with swimming pool and guest house. “Why not?” they think. The guest house is the key to the strangeness. Ethan (Duplass) is the first to find out just how strange. He goes in to find Sophie (Moss) already there, and they soon find themselves in bed. Lovey dovey for the first time in a long time. The next day, Sophie explores the guest house and finds Ethan already there. More bonding. But when they speak about it, neither has any memory of the earlier encounter. It seems that there are two people in the guest house who look and sound exactly like Ethan and Sophie. Thus the title. Which one really is the one I love? I looked forward to seeing how Elisabeth Moss would do. I remember her from her brief stint as the president’s daughter Zoe in The West Wing. Then she starred in Mad Men, a series I never got around to watching. And I saw her in the most unusual role in Top of the Lake. She’s a very talented actress, with emotional switches through subtle facial changes. You might be pleased with this movie. And Netflix would be pleased to send it to you.