Isis came in at an ungodly hour (is it ever otherwise?), left, came in again, undecided. My sleep tracked that pattern.
In the end, we were all up earlier than usual. Isis lead the way, but we all had full schedules. And so it was funny that Ed chose this more hurried time to search out cherry trees for our nascent orchard. We lost a couple of trees this winter. They were young -- sticks, nothing more -- and they succumbed to the drought, to the deer, to everything under the sun. We wanted to try again.
All this to say that breakfast was not a relaxed introduction to the day. It was a time to study again root crops and pollination schedules and to make some decisions about the future of the orchard.
That done, the day could move forward.
The earliest hours were, for me, still lost in the haze of May planting, or at least planning for planting. For instance, on my way to campus, I made a quick detour to the Flower Factory because I had forgotten to pick up a Happy Returns lily. My entire game plan for the border by the farmhouse walkway revolves around that lily.
There is, of course, much that should also be added to the emergent flower strip that Ed and I are creating -- the one that links the farmhouse with the sheep shed -- but we're proceeding slowly there. Seeds are a nice frugal filler for new large beds. I used a lot of seeds these last days: 4 packs of nasturtium, three packs of cosmos, etc.
At the nearly empty grounds of the Flower Factory, I walked with my umbrella from one hoop house to the next, remembering when the place opened some twenty years ago. I was so happy to see that perennials were finally catching on here, in the States.
Today, I had that same feeling of appreciative delight. So much color, even on this bleakest of spring days.
Bleak -- yes. But not a deterrent for the hardy few. There will always be those who'll be out on the waters of our lakes so long as there isn't an ice cover.
Supper. If ever there was a night to make soup -- this was it. I should have kept to our favorites, but instead I was tempted to replicate a chickpea concoction from the newspaper. It was a boring soup. The salad added the color. The soup -- the protein I suppose.
Not everything about a wet day is perfect. For example, Isis left wet prints on the floor every time he went out then in again. And the flowers -- there will always be those that lay down flat under the heaviness of a steady rainfall. But, the paw prints dry, the flowers perk up again. May is kind in that way: it almost always apologizes for its mistakes.
