Come We To the Summer

It’s officially summer now and the season arrived in style. The very first day of summer was warm and sunny, just as it should be. After sundown, a beautiful full moon rose. That night the fireflies were the best we’ve seen so far. And in the middle of the night we had our first summer thunderstorm. Thunder and lightning and the sound of rain pelting the house woke me up. It was wonderful.

Full moon on the Summer Solstice with fireflies.

June is the month of roses. I first grew roses in my gardens in California. Back then I grew the sort of roses everyone else grew, hybrid teas. They were pretty and some of them were fragrant. Later I discovered and planted “English roses” which were actually modern roses bred to look like old fashioned roses. When we moved here I planted some of those modern roses, but our climate here is just a bit too severe for them. They never made it through their first winter. There was a very old rose bush in the yard here already. It was a sad thing growing up through an overgrown and half-dead lilac bush. I didn’t pay much attention to it. The lilac bush eventually died and we pulled it out. Without the lilac to inhibit it, that old rose bush began to flourish again. I dug a new flower bed around it and put in a picket fence and that’s where it still grows. It is a truly old rose and, like the antique varieties, it only blooms for few weeks in June. It has full round pink blossoms and a wonderful fragrance. There are other old rose bushes around Gold. I see them blooming near the oldest houses and in places where there once were houses that are now gone. Just down the road at the Burrell’s house there is a huge, magnificent bush with deep crimson purple roses that smell the way I imagine heaven smells. If I had the skills, I’d take a cutting of it to grow in my own garden. In June when it blooms, I make a pilgrimage every few days to it to take in the wonder of it. I love roses.

My old rose bush.

Burrell's old rose bush.

The peonies also bloom in June here. I know in other more mild climes they bloom in time for Memorial Day, but not here. Here their glory days don’t come until mid-June. My peonies came with the house. They were planted here and there, mostly in places that had become too shady for them to thrive. Our second spring here, I dug them all up and moved them to become the backbone of my new long flower bed. They are mostly shades of pink and all of them are fragrant. I love to pick bouquets of them to bring into the house.

Peony bouquet.

Our war with the rodents continued all week. As of today we’ve caught eight chipmunks, eight voles, and one red squirrel. That’s the same number of chipmunks I reported last week, so we didn’t catch any more last week. They’re still out there, but they’ve gotten wise to the trap. We’ll have to devise a new strategy. And so the battle continues.

My garden is flourishing and everything is progressing nicely. We're getting lots of strawberries. now. I have great hopes for my tomatoes. The grape vines are getting ready to bloom and there are lots of clusters. The apple trees are full of little apples plumping up. The poppies are the stars of the garden right now. Everyday we go out to admire them and decide which is our favorite that day.

Josiah and strawberries.

 

The straw bale garden.

Tuesday's favorite poppy.

Thursday's favorite poppy.

Saturday's favorite poppy.

The other day as I was sitting on the back porch stairs fixing the string in the weed whacker, it occurred to me how many things happen on the back porch stairs. They are eight feet wide and rise four feet from the ground to the porch. They are made of concrete that has worn down over the years to the point where they have “character.” My memories of them go way back. When I was a child and we used to come here to visit Aunts Esther and Eleanor, I remember sitting on the back porch stairs to shell peas and sitting there to put my shoes on after running in the yard barefoot or taking a walk up the dusty Rapley Road. Since coming here to live, my associations with the back porch stairs are even stronger. It’s where I’ve sat so many times with my children snapping beans, forking elderberries from their clusters, cleaning garlic for planting, and sometimes just sitting and talking. The back porch stairs are on the west side of the house and in the afternoons it is a warm and sunny place to sit where you can look at the garden and, if you stay long enough, watch the sunset. If I had to rate my favorite places in this house, I think the back porch stairs would be right near the top of the list.

The back porch stairs.

Our riding lawn mower was having problems. After ten years of mowing two large lawns (ours and Shilligs – we share the mower), it was on its last legs. The transmission was shot and it wouldn’t make it up the hills in our yards or up the ramp into the shed anymore. Last week when I was mowing Shillig’s lawn, the steering rod on the front wheel broke. We had to lash it back together with wire to finish mowing. We called our repair shop and they said they wouldn’t repair it anymore. So on Saturday we headed to our local Cub Cadet dealer, where we bought the old one. They were having a big sale and said they’d take the old one as a trade in. So, later that day they delivered our new mower. It will mostly be used to mow Shillig’s lawn since I use a push reel mower now, but now and then, when I don’t have time or the grass has gotten too long, I will use it here too. It’s a very nice mower and has a grass catcher, which will be nice when the leaves come down in the fall. While we were at it, we repaired the shed ramp too.

Josiah repairing the shed ramp and the new mower behind him.

Kurt was away out west on business and when he arrived home on Friday night, he had Kohl and her two boys, Wade and Reed, with him. They are the first in big group of family that will be here over the next few weeks. Rachel and her family will arrive on the first of July. Sarah and Tosh and Sasha will be here for the Fourth of July. And more family will arrive after that. There’s lots of summer fun ahead for us.

Sunrise on the first day of summer.