Thursday, May 19, 2011

hopscotch

Hear that?
What?
In the attic.

No, not mice. Something else. We don't know what. We talk about laying some traps, but the idea of crawling up there once a day to check on them is enough to put that idea to rest. For a while anyway.


Warmer today. Breakfast, late, very late, after some work is done late, on the porch...


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...Where the robin has come back and removed the twigs she had used to start a nest. That’s one bird invested in her building materials!

Isis gets his dish of milk. Satisfied, he picks a choice spot in the flower bed and dozes off.


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I have got to stop spending all spare dollars on perennials.

Even as it is an irresistible thing: so many spaces begging (in my mind) for flowers! So close (maybe five miles) to the Midwest’s most wonderful perennial greenhouse (The Flower Factory)! And the drive there is utterly lovely.


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We arrive just as a bus is loading up -- passengers and trays of flowers. Members of the Quad City Botanical Club (based in Davenport, Iowa) are down here for the morning.  I don't blame them. I'd travel this far for good flowers.

I add some favorite performers – penstemon, coreopsis, lupinus.

At the farmette, I dig out (with my hand – you can better feel the roots that way) lots of weeds. Then put in the new guys.


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The rhubarb is spilling onto the path to the farmhouse. I mean, really spilling over. Whatever am I going to do with all the rhubarb? No, don’t say pie. No pie.


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Ed gets on his John Deere. The grass is seeding, it is that tall. Ed gets off his Deere. Blade issues. Engine issues. He works on fixing one thing, then another. I use the standard mower to get to places that a Deere can’t get to.


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Isis is here now, in the farmhouse. Begged his way in for a short while. I want to know – how do you ask a cat to leave when he lets you know with his whole being that he loves being near you? Darn animal. What’s the exit strategy here anyway?


At the café this afternoon, I read papers. The sun is out, but I read papers.

Is there a pattern to my days right now? No, I don’t think so.