Thursday - 167th

Ceremonies, tears, certificates.

Dry flower beds. This is when you seek inspiration in the pots. Pots of flowers, watered, thriving.


























Not to take away from the very last lilies: you've been great!











Calamintha, cornflower, sweet pea, all in a little blue vase from Turkey. Breakfast.







The last day of that unique dynamic, when both kids are here for Gaga's summer school.











Today, for the first time, Sparrow joins Snowdrop in the plant watering enterprise.























What's there to harvest? Well, there are the green beans. He has seen her eat them raw. He wants to like them. But you know, a raw bean has a bite to it. "Crunch," he says. And then hands me the remains.







She just eats them up as if they were potato chips.






Snowdrop finds the path I'd put into the Big Bed in early spring. You couldn't walk it in the thick of summer growth. Now -- no problem. (I hold Sparrow's hand and we follow.)






In the farmhouse: reading. A big shift here. At the beginning of summer, Snowdrop treated reading as something she had to study. It was work. Now, she is excited to apply her skills to books, any books, all books. She cant' yet read all the words in them, but she wants to see if she can give it a shot.






This is tough for the little guy. He wants us to play, together, like yesterday and the day before.

Eventually, we do. Puzzles, old pretend stuff. Hair clipping once more. And then Snowdrop wants to put on a dance show. The three of us take part in it. There is a lot of energetic movement.






Sparrow joins in, but he is just at that age when he understands that things aren't random, they have meaning, yet, he's not quite sure what that meaning might me.






Art distractions...











Time to go! Ahah, are you coming with us? Of course!





Graduation: Snowdrop spent nearly four years at her beloved school. She would have had a ceremony, an ending, closure, but you know, she, along with millions, billions of kids the world over, was robbed of that meaningful milestone. This summer, she had a weekly Zoom meeting with some new teachers and a handful of schoolmates. Everyone tried to make it fun. Missing were her friends, her own teachers, that special doll house where she and her BF squabbled over who should play which character. And then, it all ended, with barely a fizzle.

So her parents staged a graduation today. To give her the closure she needed. To recognize that she was transitioning to an exciting new place.











Congratulations!






Ice cream sundaes follow. I eat a lot of chocolate ice cream.

Just a few more minutes... with the kids.  She reads, he snuggles.






Grandkids. Yours, mine, you know how it all plays out. You know how beautiful their sweet souls are, how making do with Zoom and FaceTime is fine, really more than fine, but how you really are just counting the days until it can all be real time once more.



We leave. Ed and I do curbside errands. He needs parts to attempt a fix of the water heather. We need corn. There is no corn. Maybe on the weekend. It's going to be a short season this year. No rain. Lots of other unfortunate events all around us, but for our gardens and fields of produce, what stands out is the fact that there is no rain.