There is no time or place I love more than my garden on these mild June mornings when the early sunlight is soft and golden in the tree tops and the shadows are long and green. Everything is fresh and wet with dew and the fragrance of the mock oranges floats in the still air. The catbird and the thrasher singing in the thick brush across the road with their vocal variations making a sort of counterpoint, the rose-breasted grosbeak’s soft song, the cardinal’s happy “cheer, cheer, cheer,” the sad cooing of the mourning doves, and from the beaver pond, the deep twanging of the bullfrogs fills the world with wild music. I imagine that the Garden of Eden was in a perpetual state of June and winter was a consequence of The Fall.
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| June morning. |
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| The mock orange in the front yard. |
It was warm all week and we were blessed with rain. Out in the garden things are thriving. We’ve started eating lettuce. The fava beans are blooming. The squash and cucumbers have sprouted at last and are growing quickly. The flower beds are in transition to summer – the lupines and iris are fading fast, the larkspur, sweet Williams, poppies, and hollyhocks are ready to take over. The foxgloves, one of my favorite flowers, are in bloom. And the lovely old rose that grows on my picket fence is in full bloom. I don’t know what kind it is. It was here long before I arrived. It is a true old rose, only blooming for a few short days in June. Its perfume is a heavy and intoxicating rose scent.
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| Lettuce ready to eat. |
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| Fava beans in bloom. |
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| The last iris. |
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| Foxgloves. |
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| The old rose on the picket fence. |
Down on the bank behind the barn, the wild blackberries are blooming. I love blackberries – the flowers and the fruit. I have domestic blackberries in my garden, a thornless variety called Chester. They have been in my garden for more than ten years, but have never born fruit because their canes must survive the winter into their second year and that hasn’t happened – until this year. They survived and have flower buds for the first time. I’m really looking forward to the fruit later in the summer.
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| Wild blackberries by the barn. |
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| Wild blackberry flowers. |
Summer will begin officially on Wednesday as we arrive at the solstice. Summers here are pretty mild. During a heat wave we might get warmer than the mid 80's, but usually we stay below that. And at night we usually cool into the 50's. I’ve lived where summers are hot and humid – my early years down state, my teenage years in the Midwest, and two years in Japan. The summers in Southern California, where we lived for 20 years, are not really humid, but they are HOT. The temperature can hit 110° or more – and that’s normal. I cannot handle temperatures above 90° anymore. I start to melt like I’m made of beeswax. Josiah has mentioned the heat already where he is in Southern California. I think he’ll find he hasn’t felt the worst of it yet. No, I like summers here.
I was busy all week. I took advantage of the warm weather to do some of the big outdoor jobs. On Monday I power-washed the house. Our house is sided with white vinyl siding and it gets dirty. The north side of the house is especially bad. Green algae and moss grow on the siding. That’s also the most visible side of the house, so I try to keep it presentable. I spent four hours with the power-washer (it’s really the Shillig’s power-washer, thank you Kurt and Julie) spraying off all the dust, dirt, algae, and moss. I got soaked to the skin, but it was a warm day and I didn’t mind. The house looks much better now.
On Tuesday I began preparing the back porch for painting. I didn’t realize it would be such a hard task removing the old paint. It took me several days to do it. And rainy weather interrupted my work. I’ll keep working on it this week and hope to be finished painting by the weekend.
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| Working on painting the back porch. |
And in addition to all that, I managed to mow two lawns twice during the week. It takes me almost three hours to mow both lawns (ours and Shillig’s). And I tried to keep up with the weeding, a
daunting task with things growing so rampantly. I also worked on five
barn quilt orders.
If you’ll recall, back in February I was informed that I was insulin intolerant and told I had to do something or I was headed for diabetes. My doctor gave me dietary guidelines to follow and told me I needed to lose weight and exercise more. Following those dietary guidelines, I’ve lost almost 50 pounds – ten more to go to hit my goal. The exercise recommendation I knew would be difficult for me. I hate exercising for the sake of exercising. I keep active in the summertime with work outdoors, and I take long walks now and then, but I’ve never been one for riding stationary bikes, or running on a treadmill, or any sort of exercise involving equipment. When they told me I should exercise more and regularly, Stacey jumped right in and told me I should go to yoga class with her. She’d been going for several years and had been wanting me to go with her, but I’d managed to avoid it – until then. Now after several months of going to class with her, I find that I love it. When I first went, I was stiff and wobbly, but I’ve gotten better and can bend and balance in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible a few months ago. Not only do we go to class every Monday afternoon, but we do a little yoga routine together at home most evenings. Who would have thought?
Today is Father’s Day so I feel the need to say a little something about my father and about being a father. It’s hard to pay adequate tribute to my father. I don’t know how to express the depth of love I have for him or describe the extent of his influence in my life. I have been so blessed to have such a brilliant man for a father. He has been and continues to be an example of a loving husband, a devoted father, and a man striving to be a righteous servant of the Lord and church he loves. As for being a father – it is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I have been blessed with wonderful children who are a source of great joy for me. I got some great gifts for Father’s Day – some nice shirts from Geoffrey’s family, a FitBit from Miriam and the Thayn family, and my wife made me a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies that I can actually eat!
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| Poppies. |
It’s warm again today, 85° and sunny. The forecast says we have some thunderstorms headed our way this evening. We’re home from church now. We had some good talks on fathers. I got to teach Doctrine and Covenants section 76 in Sunday School, which I love. Stacey is making tacos for lunch and they smell delicious. Lunch, followed by a Sabbath nap, evening thunderstorms, and, of course, those cookies are making it look like a pretty good Father’s Day for me.
