Monday

I'm not sure which came first -- the bang or the flash, but something must have caused me to look up and out to the big maples by the road. They seemed to have been struck by a meteor, or maybe a laser gun, or could it be lightening? Not possible. There was no storm near us. Inside the farmhouse, the power flickered but clung to life. Then it gave up the fight and went out.

My immediate thought was that the house is completely useless without power. No water, no stove, no fridge, no computer. No WiFi, no TV, no recharge to any of my devices. No AC either, but we're not using it much right now. My second thought was -- now we can finally go back to that old fashioned activity of reading real books that you hold in your hands while sprawled out on the couch. Like the olden days.

And we did that. But, we live in incredible times. A germy sneeze can kill us, but an electrical generator blowing up on you will have the electric company guys out here in the middle of nowhere within minutes and half an hour later, the offending branch will have been trimmed and the necessary fixes accomplished. Power back on. I barely read two brief chapters of my mystery novel!

The night was wet. The morning was wet. We got another two inches of rain, as measured in our cup. Perhaps more -- our little cup may well have splashed out the remaining water. Ed thinks we should put out a bigger cup, but I remind him we're not in it for accurate meteorological data from the the farmette. The world does not care how much it rained here. We merely need to know if the baby trees out back are getting their required inch each week.

The garden is weedy but nice.

And here's the thing: I love the farmette landscape in ten out of the twelve months of the year!  I think it's completely silly to fixate on July as the month of great beauty and to regard the rest as some kind of lesser alternatives. That's not being a naturalist, it's being wedded to a glossy magazine's idea of beauty. April here is magnificent with its buds, its daffodils, its constant surprises! September is enchanting as the crab turns golden and the apples blush with color. February skies are beautiful and when it snows, the landscape is magical. So no, it's not all about July here. And sure enough, I find this kind of August scene to be equally sensual.

(You ask which two months are my challenge? November and March. It's hard for me to love the great outdoors in Wisconsin in November and March.)

Breakfast, in between rain showers, on the porch.

Much of the rest of the day is spent thinking about how to reconfigure my September trip given the Delta issues (cancellation is the easiest option, but it's still too early to go that route) and, too, on selecting pillow covers for the couch pillows here. Remember? That's the project I took on to distract me from trip stresses. We wont build a new barn, so instead I picked new pillow covers on Etsy. 

One has to make do with what's possible.