Sunday

Today, our waking hours start with breakfast.






For once, the morning is pleasantly cool. June weather. Beautiful and crisp, vibrant and inviting.






We have time today and there is a project that draws us: volunteers are needed for prairie maintenance at the Brooklyn Wildlife Area. We hike there constantly. It's time we do our bit by pulling out invasives that are a constant threat to the native plants that grow here.

Prairie flowers bloom from spring to late fall in places that have not been taken over by honeysuckle, thistle, wild parsley, garlic mustard  or Queen Ann's lace. Walking through the dense grasses, you encounter blooms that are at once delicate and as hardy as the toughest of your garden flowers.







It's a beautiful meadowland of mixed grasses, berries and flowers.






When we work on prairie restoration, we always come back  (in thought and discussion) to our own three acres. I've wanted to manage the land north of the barn ever since I moved to the farmette. Ed has been skeptical. He doesn't think we have enough energy to keep a prairie going. After a year of mowing down the horrible invasives, I gave up trying to do it on my own.

But now the idea comes up again and we talk it over with Don, the guy who oversees the prairie work at Brooklyn.

He talks about staging the work: on being less ambitious. On doing just a little, if that's all we can do.

I turn to Ed -- should we give it a go?
Ed looks at me rather indulgently and he explains to Don -- Nina always wants to do things yesterday, whereas I want to do them in maybe three years...

We are an oddly matched pair!






Cutting across the prairie on our way back...











How many shades of green in that lovely field of grass! This same field that two months ago was a vast expanse of brown...






(Back home now) What do you have against the color brown -- Scotch appears to be asking...







Evening: the young family is here for dinner and guess what! The minute Snowdrop comes into the farmhouse, she goes... grocery shopping with her babies! What a surprise!






Momentarily distracted by polka dancing on Ed's screen...






Dinner on the porch: it's father's day and we certainly have a great dad to celebrate here tonight and yet, when Snowdrop is with us, our eyes inevitably are drawn to what the little girl is up to...






Are we done with dinner yet??






Yes, unless you want dessert...







This is, of course, the week of long days and I can't tell you how much I love the spill of daylight into evening hours. When the young family leaves, I'm not ready to call it a day yet and so Ed and I go out on his motorbike, just to get that great scent of summer air as we zip along the rural roads.