I spent the weekend weeding all the gardens – and I do mean ALL the gardens. I hate weeding, but three straight days of rain last week meant that weeds had completely taken over and when you get down to it, there is something so satisfying about weeding when you look back at a freshly weeded bed. It just seems so neat and orderly, if only for the time being.
Five Photos, Five Stories, #5
I don’t know why this sign amuses me so much, but it does. I pass by this sign several times a daily, as it’s just up the street. It’s had the plummage on top for over a year, so I’m guessing I’m not the only one who finds it amusing. If only every road sign had a little welcoming flair….
Five Photos, Five Stories, #4
A minivan slowed down as I rounded the corner to our front gate. A window opened and a little girl was waving something at me.
“It’s from Venable” her mother said from the driver’s seat, as I realized who and what it was. A spare vintage handkerchief I whipped out of my purse and handed to the mom friend next to me during our children’s fourth grade ‘moving up’ ceremony as we collectively became a bit misty eyed over our children’s departure from the sweet elementary school they had attended for the previous five years. A school they had left 3 years ago now – how had it been that long? It didn’t seem like that long ago they were in kindergarten, telling us how they thought we should befriend each other because it seemed to them we’d get along. They were right of course, and we’ve been friends ever since.
A voice from the back seat inquired when our next sewing night was – which reminded us it had been way, way too long since we got together to knit which really was just an excuse to drink wine. We used to have a regular night, but then trying to keep up with kids and husbands and jobs and life made it harder to pull off and it sort of fell by the wayside, although thanks in part to those former kindergartners turned eighth graders(!), we still manage to keep tabs on each other, if not occasionally run into each other. So we set a date and for the first time in a week, I felt okay about the fact that I had failed to line up summer activities for my child, because this particular mom friend hadn’t either and frankly, she was looking forward to the open slated-ness of the season, which I kind of admit, so am I. I realize this is probably what our kids saw that made them realize we should be friends and why they remind us to hang out.
And while this is not at all why I happen to carry spare hankies – always vintage ones of course – it is awfully nice to know that these sort of quirks of mine are readily accepted, just like I completely understood it took a little while to come back to me. Sometimes life gets in the way, but like raising kids, sometimes these things are just moments in time.
Whenever the opportunity to drive a back road presents itself, I take it. I have a habit of snapping shots like this while driving – it’s far more challenging with my DSLR than with my point and shoot. The p&s I can pop out the open sunroof and be confident I will get a decent shot if I just keep shooting, but even if I put all my settings to automatic with the big fancy camera, I sometimes have to stop what I’m doing and shoot. Thankfully, when you have a habit of photographing roads like this, they lend themselves to you stopping in the middle of nowhere to do just that. I took this on my way to one of my favorite strawberry patches last spring – sometimes just getting there and back is the reason I go. There’s just something soothing about driving down roads like this one.
Suzicate at The Water Witch’s Daughter invited me to play Five Photos, Five Stories. I invite Patience at Fatuous Observations to participate. If you wish to play the rules are that you post a picture a day with a story, fiction or non-fiction, or a poem and nominate one fellow blogger a day to participate.
When Pat’s folks were here in early April, we took a day trip to up Washington, Virginia. Pat’s dad Jack had been doing some genealogy and discovered his four time Great Grandfather (did I get that right?) Calvert had operated a mill there in the late 1700’s. While we’ve driven by Washington numerous times over the years, we’ve never stopped off, as it is off the main highway. We learned it’s only a few minutes off the main highway, much closer than we had thought. The mill was located just outside of the town proper. It was only later, when I was looking through my shots did I realize we’ve driven by this mill countless times on the road just above it, thanks to the green sign in the upper left hand side of this photo. I thought it was just an old barn and definitely did not have a clue as to it once being part of the family. Funny how things like that work out, isn’t it?
Suzicate at The Water Witch’s Daughter invited me to play Five Photos, Five Stories. I invite Melissa at Green Girl in Wisconson to participate. If you wish to play the rules are that you post a picture a day with a story, fiction or non-fiction, or a poem and nominate one fellow blogger a day to participate.
I like to wander my yard with my camera in hand. I’ve been teaching myself to shoot manually for the last year or so. I’ve briefly – as in, sat in the yard one afternoon with a stack of library books and a glass of wine – studied the ins and outs of this. I only vaguely know the terms, but I have (mostly) figured out how to set my camera to achieve the shots I want. I learn more by doing than I do by reading sometimes, and this is definitely true when it comes to photography. Thank goodness for digital, which makes learning to play so much cheaper and easier than film photography. I like to capture light and moods, I love shooting with macro lens and focusing in on details. My garden and everything that inhabits it, are some of my favorite things to shoot because they are always changing, always in flux. What’s in bloom today can be gone tomorrow. Such is the tale of this spider. I was walking into the basement to check laundry when I saw the late afternoon sunlight shining through the web and ran to grab my camera, as that light can be fleeting. I held my breath as I shot, almost unable to believe I was able to capture so beautifully the streaming sun light through the delicate web. It’s taken me a good bit of work as well as luck to be able to shoot this photo. Such is life, isn’t it? You can work all you want, but sometimes, you just luck into things.
Suzicate at The Water Witch’s Daughter invited me to play Five Photos, Five Stories. I invite Cassi at Bad at Being Mom to participate. If you wish to play the rules are that you post a picture a day with a story, fiction or non-fiction, or a poem and nominate one fellow blogger a day to participate.
I publicly outed myself (and my entire family) as decidedly not beet fans a few years ago in an article published for one of the alternative weeklies, which prompted just about every chef I know to come crawling out of the woodwork with suggestions as to how I could prepare beets so that we would like them. I managed to find some ways we like to eat them, but it’s still not a popular dinner item. This changed recently however, when I stumbled upon a serving presentation that actually caused me to hear “Can we please have that again?”.
It was a glorious Memorial Day weekend here. The weather was just simply beautiful and honeysuckle scented. We had no where to be for three whole days – a first since a snowstorm I’m pretty sure. Pat went fishing with Cola, we had lots of girl time in the yard, gardening was done, back roads were driven in pursuit of local berries, which got jammed and frozen while the strawberries we picked from our yard garden got turned into strawberry ice cream that was shared at an impromptu dinner last night with Charles and Carol, our second dinner party with neighbors over the weekend. There was a yard sale score in the shape of a pretty new covered cake stand – the sort that you can flip upside down and turn into a punch or trifle bowl in a pinch, which I guess gets entered into both collections, bringing me to four punchbowls and eight cake stands. To celebrate, I baked a pound cake – this is my go-to recipe, one I tore out of Southern Living eons ago. Just dump everything in your stand mixer and let it go. I love those sorts of recipes. Baking the pound cake was also to use up some of the four dozen duck eggs that were dropped off this weekend, some of which might be involved in a pickling project. The pound cake was pretty divine served with the homemade, homegrown strawberry ice cream. Ambitious to-do lists were made and accomplished this weekend, although the house didn’t really get cleaned like it needs. Now that I’ve wrapped up my last PB&J Fund classes for the semester, I’ll have free afternoons again so maybe I can get that caught up. I did get laundry (mostly) caught up this weekend. One shouldn’t be too ambitious about these things I don’t think. All in all, it was a lazily productive weekend, the sort that had lots of impromptu pop-ins and visits, poison ivy, lazy yard drinks, beautiful evenings and the first lightening bug sightings of the season. Hello summer.
Of all the adventures I had over the years with my cousin Henry, I think the one everyone found hands down most entertaining was the time he traded me to a Mexican for a pitcher of beer (“And a t-shirt!” Henry would always add).
My dream garden is part cottage, part little -old-lady with lots of roses, peonies and lilacs. Unfortunately, our yard, which has enough space to plant loads of these items, is far too shady to actually be hospitable to them. This doesn’t stop me from trying to grow those things though, in our limited full sun spots. Continue reading
Chicken Wire & Paper Flowers 