like summer, only not really

Near 90 today. Hot, deliciously hot air, so that the windows stay open all night, fully open. In the morning, there’s not a doubt that breakfast belongs on the porch.

Ed, are you ready (for your cereal and fruit)?

No, gotta work, it’ll be hot... gotta shovel the chips...

 

But within minutes, he’s on the porch with me. No one can resist cereal and fruits and the gentle rock of a wrought iron chair..

I go to the market with my daughter. It’s crowded – extremely so. Graduation weekend means that thousands of graduating Wisconsin students are looking for things to do with their parents, aunts, uncles. The market! You have to see the market!

Yep, they were all there.To admire, to taste.

In the afternoon, I grade.

Well, for a while. There are hours of woodchip shoveling too, in the hot hot air of a day that is still a month short of the real summer season.

And maybe because the flower beds are looking so good and so he wants to lend his support to the project, or maybe because they don’t look good enough and so he wants to improve them, or maybe he wants to distract me from the incredible damage done to the strawberries by the chipmunks – for whatever reason, Ed offers to go with me to pick up five daylilies from the Flower Factory. Probably our last trip there this year. After spring planting, gardening becomes all about maintenance. 

Ah, the Flower Factory... The place that has grown in leaps and bounds in marketing perennials -- at the same time that I have grown from being mildly intrigued by planting them to being fully dazzled by their various quirks and permutations.  Of course, part of the joy of visiting the place is in seeing what's growing in their own gardens.

We make the trip on the motorbike on a very windy day. Windy rides are always an adventure and especially when you’re trying to tote five daylilies in the milk cart behind you. We manage. Just barely.

And then evening comes and it is time to water. I pick our first radish...

 ...and lots and lots of rhubarb and then I move through the pattern I've developed for my watering ritual and I have to say, nothing, nothing is more satisfying than standing with a hose on a hot “summer” evening, thinking of little more than how pretty drops of moisture look on emerging flowers.