Sunday

Looking now at my calendar for the rest of the summer, I see that this is the last "normal" Sunday until sometime in September. It's not surprising, I suppose. People come and go in these holiday months. Routines are broken, vacationing sets in. We explore. We play. We do all the stuff we can't possibly fit into our everyday.

Me, I'm not doing the traveling (unless you count a hop and a skip to Chicago as travel). But Ed is. And he is preparing for it. Today he is trying out a new safety harness. In a rather bizarre vignette, I stand by with a sharp knife and watch as he suspends himself on a rope from the garage rafters. I suppose had he spun around in some terrible way, hanging himself in the process, I would have used the knife to bring him down. Luckily, my intervention was not required.


The day does start off far more calmly: I pick spent lilies. I did start to count, but my mind drifted and at some midpoint, I forgot whether I was at 256 or 356 and so I abandoned this compulsive little exercise and enjoyed a rather blank mind. (I did have to swat bugs. Two weeks have passed since we had the farmette sprayed with garlic, peppermint and rosemary oils and the barrier keeping the mosquitoes out is wearing thin.)

The garden looks scrumptious to me, but then I'm biased.






(It's not just the daylilies...)






(... though they are my focal point right now)






Breakfast on the porch -- notable for the dish of picked raspberries. I braved the bugs to gather these because the berries are inching past their prime.


 







I am quite tempted to take down many more raspberry canes next year -- most do not get enough sunlight to produce a good crop so they become a weedy nuisance. The trouble is, when you take something out, you have to put something in its place. We have to think of a ground cover that's more clever than the buckwheat we tried out this year. The promised bees never came, even as the mosquitoes were quite happy to flourish and multiply among the tiny white flowers.

Anyway, breakfast. With the raspberries.






At noon, Ed asks for my help with tree maintenance. Overhanging branches have dropped debris on the roof and this in turn has created some spots vulnerable to leaks. He wants to chop down the limbs from his roof perch. My job is to catch and redirect the falling branches so that they don't destroy my shady garden.






The younger chicks decide to sit this one out. They hide. On branches of a tree. I am reminded that they are indeed birds.






Despite the bugs, Ed and I actually do a good bit of outdoor work. We both know that days when we can work together like this are precious and limited this year. We don't waste them.



And in the evening, the young family comes over for dinner. They'd been to a Dodgers game -- a terrific treat as they're all Dodgers fans... can you tell? (It was Sparrow's first baseball game.)











(Snowdrop protests that she doesn't have enough shrimp. Ed obliges by handing over his share.)






(Shrimp, shells, asparagus, sun dried tomatoes and corn. Happy girl!)






(Of course, happy children make for happy parents...)






I did make ice cream out of the market sour cherries. To be consumed with macarons.

Ah, la vie en rose...






Sparrow, unfortunately, could have neither the ice cream nor the macarons.







Late evening. Ed puts away the cheepers, I look out at the muted dusky landscape. How beautiful it all is... Every bit of it!