Good grapes

We harvested our first real batch of grapes a few weeks ago and James made them into grape jelly. Now we have our second batch and we'll see what we make of this one!

cooling rains

They say it's darkest just before sunrise but this summer the image that comes more to mind is that it is hottest and driest just before the storm. It has been a particularly hot and dry summer here and recently we've been in a drought. Two days ago after ten minutes outside we all came back in for fear of heat stroke. But then a storm system moved in over-night and yesterday started out cloudy. I woke disgruntled, however, because the system and little rain we got only seemed to be pouring (somehow) more humidity into the mix. But over the course of the day it seemed to be getting slowly cooler until the difference was unmistakable. We finally had cooled off to a more comfortable temperature (even with the humidity). Today we got the inches of rain we so desperately needed and even more cool temperatures. The difference within 48 hours is difficult to believe. I would like to think that this weather pattern is an image of how we are faring as a family. We're at the point where the clouds have rolled in and a certain amount of rain has fallen but it's still in some ways more hot and sticky than it had been previously. But we have hope that more rain or a progression of the front will bring the relief we have been at times almost unable to believe is on its way. To continue the metaphor, in this drought we have lost a certain number of plants in the garden but some have fared better than if there had been steady rain and clement temperatures. So there is that. I just have been trying to live now with what we have and see what comes next. Praise to God that we have made it this far!

Dirt time

There are, obviously, many things I appreciate about my husband but one has been at the fore-front of my mind recently while he has been home so much. I love how he is thoughtful about ensuring the boys have a place of their own within all of our spaces and projects and time. This picture shows how our front garden has been evolving with plants next to toy roads. It may look unfinished or messy but it's a pretty good illustration of our life and I love it!

Spring weather

As is usual for spring we've been having fairly widely varying weather. But the blossoms are here on our maples and leaves will not be far behind. I am looking forward to putting in our own garden this year!

Anne Fadiman through the tulips

I recently borrowed Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader from a friend and thoroughly enjoyed it. I have lifted a few excerpts and placed them here the better to remember it by. I am sorry for the lack of context which would add even more richness to many of the quotes but will have only to recommend that you find and read the book in its entirety. I have entwined the quotes with pictures of last year's tulips because flowers and renewal cannot come soon enough to the darkness of this tired and dirty world. "After five years of marriage and a child, George and I finally resolved that we were ready for the more profound intimacy of library consolidation." "Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure." "My sonnets looked like poems. They quacked like poems. But at seventeen, when I got to college and my critical faculties suddenly kicked in, I had to admit that they weren't really poems. I had mistaken for lyric genius what was in fact merely the genetic facility for verbal problem-solving that enabled everyone in my family to excel at crossword puzzles, anagrams, and Scrabble." "During the next thirty years I came to realize that just as there is more than one way to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book." "To us, a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy." "On the sanguinary fields of gender politics, Ms. has scored a clear victory. I wish I could say the same of, say, the United Church of Christ's new 'inclusive' hymnal, in which "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" has been replaced by "Dear God, Embracing Humankind." The end is estimable; it's the means that chafe. I'm not sure I want to be embraced by an Almighty with so little feeling for poetry. Yet, having heard the new version, I can't say I feel entirely happy with the old one either. As is all too often the case these days, I find my peace as a reader and writer rent by a war between two opposing semantic selves, one feminist and one reactionary." "I believe that although my father and E. B. White were not misogynists, they didn't really see women, and their language reflected and reinforced that blind spot." "What I am saying here is very simple: Changing our language to make men and women equal has a cost. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. High prices are attached to many things that are on the whole worth doing. It does mean that the loss of our heedless grace should be mourned, and then accepted with all the civility we can muster, by every writer worth his'er salt." "Our father, who often boasted that he had never actually done anything except think, was still the same person he had been when he started collecting books in the early 1920s. He and his library had never diverged. Our mother, on the other hand, had once led a life of action. And why had she stopped? Because she had had children. Her books, which seemed the property of a woman I had never met, defined the size of the sacrifice my brother and I had exacted." "Other people's walls looked naked to me. Ours weren't flat white backdrops for pictures. They were works of art themselves, floor-to-ceiling mosaics whose vividly pigmented tiles were all tall skinny rectangles, pleasant to the touch and even, if one liked the dusty fragrance of old paper, to the sniff." "Now you know why I married my husband. In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar." "In a secondhand bookstore, each volume is one-of-a-kind, neither replaceable from a publisher's warehouse nor visually identical to its original siblings, which have accreted individuality with every change of ownership. If I don't buy the book now, I may never have another chance. And therefore, like Beecher, who believed the temptations of drink were paltry compared with the temptations of books, I am weak." " "It was only when I saw his bookshelves--James Bond paperbacks cheek by jowl with nineteenth-century parliamentary proceedings--that I got a sense of who Clive really was. His intellectual furnishings explained him in a way his lectures hadn't. "Dispersing his library was like cremating a body and scattering it to the winds. I felt sad. And I realized that books get their value from the way the coexist with the other books a person owns, and that when they lose their context, the lose their meaning." "

Hyacinth

James picked up a couple potted bulbs this past week and they've certainly gone a long way to brighten up our living room. The hyacinth, in particular, is also contributing quite a bit of fragrance. I can't wait until the flowers start coming up outside too!

virginia creeper berries

Birdsfoot Trefoil

Usually one can expect Trefoil to be a uniform lemon-yellow flower but occasionally I have seen it with tinges of red and orange.

I came across a whole clump this colour and had to take a picture. I wonder if the drought conditions and stress have something to do with the change. The strange thing was that the one darker clump was surrounded by other clumps that were all the usual bright yellow. Whatever the reason for it, I think it's beautiful.

Pink

I don't like pink and it isn't really a Fall colour but these flowers caught my attention the other day and I think they're just right for a cold, wet day like today.

Choral Bells

I have never had much appreciation for heuchera beyond some of the interesting leaf colours that have been developed but I took these up-close pictures of the flowers and they actually turn out to be beautiful when viewed this way. Who knew?