I'm thinking of the clouds, the rains, the storms.
I'm also thinking of the two kitties -- Calico and Cutie, the sisters that keep being chased away by the teenage cats who call the farmette lands their home. (Cutie has actually been coming back daily for a feeding or two, but Calico has been gone for over a week. Every time I think she surely must be dead, she reappears, starving, thin, but happy to see me answer her incessant meows with a bowl of food.)
And I'm thinking of the return of Snowdrop's pictures, which she stopped working on for a while.
But again, I am getting ahead of myself. The day starts very early. With animals.
Some flower appreciation...
(that's a close up of this...)
And breakfast.
The kids come immediately after and even though it is lightly drizzling when they arrive, I push for a quick nature walk -- to the barn and back. They love visiting the coop and the adventure is made more exciting by the fact that Ed joins us there.
As we walk back to the farmhouse, the rain picks up, so we don't linger. And as I watch the two kids, I think to myself: who needs the other more? Your guess may be -- he does. Sparrow does everything Snowdrop does. She sits on a ball, he sits on a ball. She wants to go to art room, to read, to play with Legos -- he follows close behind.
And yet, I see in her a reliance on his presence that is touching. Even when she is pointing to his misstep -- gaga, he pushed me yesterday! -- she does it with an understanding that he is part of the family and the dynamics are complicated.
I have a hypothesis -- she tells me in the car and I smile at her choice of words. I think he pushed me because I had been wanting to do something alone and he was not happy about that.
As I said, Snowdrop is inspired to go back to drawing. This comes after reading the sweet, sweet Catwings stories (she begged to read through all four books at one sitting, but I believe in deferred gratification! If I have to wait a day for the next episode in my Crime Dramas, she must sweat it out too!) where a family of cats has wings. Her pigs in her super-pig sketches have wings. She is on it again!
It is the last day of the second week of Gaga's summer school and only now do I suggest to them a video after lunch. It's raining and I want them to have a bit of an easy moment. Olivia stories provide just that.
In the evening, it rains. And storms. And rains some more. I stir fry some fish, go back to my asparagus, and settle in with Ed for a quiet and lovely evening on the couch.