Blessings Fell Like Jewels

Last week when I was without a camera, Diana stopped me as we passed each other on our daily walk. "You've got to come see the phlox! They are at their prime," she said enthusiastically.

All week I prayed that the phlox would hold until the UPS man came with my new camera.  He came late last Friday afternoon while I was in the basement throwing a load of clothes into the wash.  I made it back upstairs just in time to see the tail lights of his van pulling away. He left a note saying someone had to sign for the package before it could be delivered.

So I grabbed my car keys. Driving like a maniac, I chased after him. I couldn't go one more minute without the camera. Luckily he stopped just up the street and didn't seem too bothered by the wild-eyed woman chasing him waving the little sticky note.  "You've got my camera!" I demanded.

I did come to my senses when he kindly handed the package over. I thanked him profusely, and the fates for making him stop just up the block, and sympathized with him about the heat. Heat is the enemy of UPS drivers an flowers of all kinds.  It can zoom them through their short-enough life span, the flowers that is, I haven't made a study of the life span of UPS drivers.

The heat is gone this week.  Diana's phlox lived long enough for me to capture them in all their glory.

Diana's garden is a delight

and so is she!

Diana, the phlox, the UPS man, they all conspired together to make this moment possible. Life is a roller-coaster ride isn't it?  I'm oft tempted, in the middle of the ride, to worry that the fun's almost over.

I woke this morning to mist swirling outside. The tennis boys didn't need me to fill in so  I spent the dawn with a cup of coffee writing in my journal.

Fog and mist outside, the windows open to summer's wet smack. Crickets competed with the steady drum of the fan. A perfect summer morning.

After breakfast I took a stroll through the mists. It was quiet, the cicadas who have been almost deafening at night hadn't started up their chorus yet. As I walked, appreciating the early summer morning warm, but not hot; I casually glanced down at the sidewalk to see it littered with cicada carcasses. I stopped, looking behind me and then forward.  Dead cicadas everywhere.

I picked up three of the most intact ones.

Some looked to have died violent deaths at the hands of birds. I gingerly carried the three in my hands planning to bring them home to marvel at their hideous beauty.

The dead cicadas reminded me of something I'd read about dying in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  We have a choice when we face death between "please" and "thank you". How I hope I say "thank you" rather than pleading for more time, more life, more, more, more. What a blessing instead to feel filled up.

This focus on death on such a lovely, misty morning feels a little weird and morbid. But here death is, crunching under my feet.  I've been walking over these dead cicadas for a quarter of a mile and just now, suddenly, I'm noticing. Can I walk with grace and humility carefully cradling these three dead cicadas?

Can I see the fragility of life, the heartbreak of endings and instead of weeping, rejoice?

The phlox are in season, alive, blooming.  The cicadas, some of them anyway, are still giving full-throated cries to summer and passion. Each has a season. Each fades, passes.

Each season I think I love best, but somewhere in the heart of it, I see the beginning of it's end.

The butternut at the end of Marijo's drive is dropping yellow leaves on the lawn and I know, soon, fall's cooling breezes will come. Can I use these dropping leaves to practice compassion and gratitude?

Thank you for summer, thank you for life, thank you for the call of the cicada and the bloom of the phlox.

Or do I give in to my more pessimistic nature and mourn the end of summer prematurely.  Wanting more, more, more? Please, please, please?

Back home I notice spider webs holding rain drops like jewels.  Such magnificent, fragile beauty. I hold my breath, stunned at the grandeur and yet routine way God creates beauty and then snuffs it out. In just a little while, the sun will come out and dry up this pretty scene. Poof, it was and will no longer be.

Poof I'm here. And then again, poof and I will no longer be. But while I'm here, I'll catch this little moment of God's extravagance.  I'll remind myself to be on the lookout each passing moment for God's divine jewels. Cradling my dead cicadas, marveling at the beauty all around. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The Sounds of Summer

The heat and humidity this week have cooked my brain and wilted my spirit. I'm ready to flee back north to my favorite little Northern city, Grand Marais, Minnesota where the temperature at 11 a.m. is a blissful 66.

Ahhh sounds like heaven to me.  Prince Charming LOVES this heat. The hotter, sticker and more humid it is, the better he loves summer. He thinks this week's weather has been just about perfect.

How is it that such opposites always seem to attract each other? So while I'd love to have spent the week draped over the cooling vents with three fans blowing on me, P.C. has forced me out into what is for him blissful weather.

I've gone out empty handed all week, no camera, which is like being suddenly blinded.  The new camera is ordered, shipped and should arrive any minute.  But until it arrives, being without the camera forced me to focus in a new way this week on the SOUNDS of summer. (Click on each of the links to receive your audio postcards as you read.)

Have you noticed the wonderful unique sounds of summer? My attention was grabbed early in the week when barely into Sunday morning just a little past midnight, P.C. and I both sat upright in bed startled by the loud boom like a cannon of thunder so close by it shook the house.  "We're under attack," I told P.C.

Prince Charming, as he always does during a storm, checked all of the windows, doors, and outside for any signs of water coming in or damage, letting me drift dreamless back to sleep.  This is one of the best things about being married to P.C. --this patrolling of the perimeter during storms.  I sleep unconcerned knowing he's on the job.  It's a thankless task, and can leave him just the tiniest bit grumpy when I don't wake and shower him with kisses but instead snore with the ease of someone who knows a responsible party is keeping me safe when he returns to report all is well.

Later Sunday, the skies cleared and we went for our first bike ride of summer together.

This is from last fall.  As you can see P.C. dresses in a very bespoke manner for his bike rides.

 Just as we have differences of opinion about the perfect summer temperature, we have different styles of biking.  I hop on and pedal.  P.C. likes to go for the "wheeeee" of biking.  He'll pedal really fast to get ahead of me, then lift his feet out and coast. I keep thinking I'm going to attach a playing card to his spokes so he can have all of the fun of his "wheeeee" biking.

Prince Charming is a man of great gravitas and decorum (note picutre above).  Except when it comes to biking and swimming.  We've spent many afternoons this week at the pool.

I like an elegant entrance down the wide steps of the pool, P.C. likes to cannon-ball off the diving boards. He's gotten the respect of all the little kids who gather around the sides of the pool to watch.

Charlie and Linda were here Wednesday for dinner.

As we walked them out to their car after the evening's festivities, the sound of the cicadas was almost deafening.

I fixed pork chops in the crock pot so as not to heat the house up for our dinner party.  They were delicious! Though I think my crock pot's high setting is a little too hot, I'm recommending only cooking them for 3 to 3/12 hours before you check them. The USDA site recommend an internal temperature of 145 degrees.  Mine cooked for 4 hours and were just a bit over cooked.

Here's the recipe from All Recipes 

Slit the sides of 4 pork chops so that the cooking fluids can penetrate the meat.

1/4 C olive oil
1 C chicken broth
1 T garlic
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp basil
1 T paprika
1 T poultry seasoning
Salt and Pepper to taste.

Pour all ingredients into the crock pot, then place meat in so that's it's covered by juices.  Should be done in 3 to 31/2 hours.

Preparing the dinner in the cool comfort of our air conditioned home reminded me of all the hot summer days when Mom would order us out to the garden to pick beans.  The hot work was finished once we'd picked them.  They still had to be stemmed. We'd find a bit of shade and hope for a breeze to stem them.  Then bring  the "mess of beans" into the house so that Mom could can them.  She used a pressure cooker which added even more heat and humidity to the all-ready suffocating interior.  Mom never trusted the pressure cooker, for good reason, and would shoo us out of the kitchen.

One time, the pressure cooker blew up. We ended up with beans on the ceiling! We kids knew that it wasn't a good scene and lit out for the safety of the tree house, our one regret was leaving the comfort of laying right in front of the old fan.

Speaking of things blowing up, we didn't even make it all the way through the Republican National Convention before the political telephone calls started pouring in.  We thought after surviving the onslaught of calls from the primary season we'd completed our civic duty.  But turns out this year, not only is Iowa the first in the nation to caucus, we're an important swing state.  And so the calls are pouring in. Every time the phone rings in my studio it startles me and I jump. I've ruined more than one painting. I thought about taking the phone out, but P.C. vetoed that idea.

When I was a kid growing up with a party line, only the adults answered the phone. So imagine my delight when I was rummaging around rearranging things and discovered this old Bakelite phone!  It has the softest, most wonderful ring. Because I grew up NOT ANSWERING to this ring, I feel no sense of urgency or dread when the phone rings. No more jumping. Every time it rings I expect Grandma to answer it with her nasal "Yellow!" I think she really said "hello" but it always sounded like "yell" pause and drop the voice and octave, "low". Grandma's been gone for a long time now, but hearing that ring brings back the pleasure of her company.

Grandma had the softest skin, even on the hottest summer days, she'd let me snuggle up to her while she sat on the back steps in the evenings, feeling the soft skin of her arms, drinking in the smell of White Shoulders bath powder.  We'd sit there looking out over the Raccoon River Valley, blue with haze and humidity. The green pastures rolling from the steps out to the timber.  We didn't say much on those long, hot, hazy summer evenings.  We'd just sit together enjoying each other's company, listening to the crickets and cicadas.

This week without the camera brought me so many little audio postcards from the past linked to the present and carrying me into the future.

The way a pebble dropped into the water sends out concentric ripples. The ripples reflect an action in the past, the pebble dropping; and effect the present, the up and down of the wave and let you see the future as the wave moves out to the edge of the pond, loosing itself in the gentle lap of the waves striking shore.

Before you go, let me reach into the photo archives to show you (albeit from last year) what's blooming in the garden this week.

Add caption

Daylillies

The big perennial bed is at it's height of blooms!

The roses are giving it a second go!

The primroses are loving the heat and humidity.

The moonbeam coreopsis.

Hope you enjoyed this audio postcard, stay cool until we talk again next week!

Spider Lake Lodge

We've had a couple of hectic weeks here in the heartland what with weeding, (I finally tamed, or at least brought a semblance of order to the jungle after several long days and one marathon 6 hour session in the garden) having the house power washed and removing everything from the screen porch so that it also could be power washed and painted, company visiting (Mom and my brother, Bill, stayed with us for five lovely, fun-filled days last week) and so Prince Charming didn't want to look at the to-do list for the coming week.

In fact he may have torn up the list (I think he just hid it, that clever P.C. is always hiding things from me).  In it's place I found tickets to a most wonderful North Woods lodge--Spider Lake Lodge.

I've been busy recording everything, for your viewing pleasure when pffffttt.....the camera went out.  I called around to see if someone could fix it.  The beauty of living in this age is that things are remarkably affordable and everything comes with a powerful computer chip built in. The downside of all that is that we no longer have a local camera shop AND no one fixes anything anymore.  You simply go out and buy new.  Since I use the camera all of the time and I've had this camera for less than a year, I wanted to do some research before investing in a new camera.  But lucky for me, the owners of Spider Lake Lodge have taken tons of photos and put them up on the web.  So all the photos here are from their web site.  Hopefully I'll have the camera replaced or repaired by next week!

So back to the Spider Lake Lodge.  It's located in Northwest Wisconsin, near Hayward.

This is not July in Wisconsin, but it is considerably cooler here than the weather at home.  The temperatures while we've been here have been in the 60's with lows dipping into the low 50's at night.  This year it's been incredibly rainy here.  Monday a fierce storm ripped through with straight-line winds and up to 10-inches of rain.  We've run into some road closures due to flooding.  Usually you expect this kind of cool moisture in May and June, but spring is running into the middle of July here in the north woods.

Never fear, Prince Charming and I have been cozy and dry snuggled up to this fire with a stack of good books to read.  Spider Lake Lodge has the best feature of all really good inns, big stacks of interesting and beautiful old books to peruse.  We spent a whole morning sitting by this fire with soft music from the 40's playing.


















Our hosts, Deb Ingstad, Andrew and Caroline Gerdes, lit candles to ward off the gloom of the day.  We could hear the loons calling from the lake.  It was a lovely, comfortable kind of perfection!


Later in the afternoon we sat on this lovely screen porch with a view of the lake.  P.C. read while I painted.




The price of the room includes a delicious breakfast prepared by Andrew, a mean cook in the kitchen with an endless supply of hot coffee and a teriffic and welcoming sense of hospitality.  Andrew has made sure we have a fire to warm us each morning.





















We stayed in the Hemingway Room in a heavenly soft bed.  The lake is right outside those sliding glass doors with a lovely balcony to sit on and enjoy the lake view (bring your mosquito spray, with all of the rain and cool weather, they are thick this year.)



The lake is beautiful. SPL has a canoe which you can take out for a ride.




























The lakes are all linked so you can paddle for a long, long time before you run out of lake.



The wind blew hard as we tried to canoe across the lake. We ducked into a channel out of the wind and had a lovely paddle through water and wood.

 We even got within a paddle length of several nesting loons taking their babies out for a ride. As Annie Dillard writes Prince Charming and I have been "up to our knees in the world" this week.  The world of wind, rain, lichen, moss, pine and oak.  A world full of the lonesome and melancholy cry of the loon, the honk of a goose, the crush of gravel underfoot, and mists in the air. A world of lake lapping at shore, trees blinking in and out of focus as fog rises and shifts, the smell of bacon wafting from the kitchen.

Someone else has buttered my bread this week and it has been delicious.

Wishing you a week of petal, feather, and stone wonder ones.  Take care of each other until next week.

Sitting Pretty

Seven years ago when we moved into this house, Prince Charming suggested we mount a porch swing outside from the deck off our bathroom.

It seemed like a great idea, but we never got around to purchasing the swing.  Instead we purchased these lovely wicker rockers.









And pretty much everything on the porch

Last year Prince Charming bought this long couch, under the flag banner, so that on Sunday afternoons I can stretch out here and pretend to read the newspaper as I take my Sunday nap.

I picked up the rocker and the little chair at garage sales.  The lamp and the two chairs which I'll show you in a minute I found at one of my favorite consignment stores, Bonita Things Quality Consignment. This store often has cute furniture sitting outside their door to lure me in. Here's a close-up of the lamp.

And the two chairs that match it have lovely little details, like the cut-out in the back.

Back detail

Front detail

A couple of years ago I decided to replace the metal chairs that used to sit here with these much more charming wicker chairs. The two I found at the consignment nicely rounded out the seating arrangement.  Much more charming that metal chairs, don't you think?

Not to wander too far from the topic of hand, that is the worry of were to sit.  But my generous niece, Melynda (read about our previous adventures here), loaned me this lovely little wicker planter.

I think the fan, adds to the vintage feel of the porch.

Prince Charming thinks this vintage fan, adds to the overall clutter that screams, crazy-little-old-lady-lives-here.  He keeps hiding the fan.  I keep finding it and putting it in a new place.  It's a lovely game we play.

We also have this wicker chair for quiet reading on the "reading patio".

And this wicker rocker by the front door where P.C. takes his morning coffee in the sunshine.

And this wicker glider on our bedroom balcony.

I nest here in the shade to write this blog.  You could join me here for a cup of coffee.

So you might feel just the slightest sympathy for P.C.'s stand that we have ENOUGH DARN PLACES TO SIT!!

But still, I had my heart set on a porch swing.  Someplace to sit and hold P.C.'s hand, maybe smooch a little as we watch evening creep across the yard.  And so last month when my birthday rolled around look what Prince Charming brought home!

Yes dear readers, a porch swing.  Isn't it charming nestled here?  In a couple more years the autumn clematis that Ann (see the previous post about the butterfly lady) gave me will wrap completely around these posts, creating my own little slice of heaven right here.  Come join me for a spot of tea, won't you?!

Now let's take a quick run over to Charlie and Linda's for a garden tour and festive 4th of July celebration.

We're continuing the theme we started last week with Linda's garden (read about it here) with another neat and tidy garden.  Charlie is an engineer by training and it shows in the absolute pristine layout of his gardens.

Makes you want to pull up a chair and lounge in the beautiful shade, no?

Look at these gorgeous vegetable gardens.  To me, seeing a garden like this is like watching the Olympic gymnasts and ice skaters, they make it look so easy to be talented and graceful, that you can fool yourself into thinking, "I can do that too."  But I've tried and failed too many times.  So now I just admire the skill, persistence and talent of gardening masters like Charlie!

A masterpiece! Not a weed in sight.

Linda, Charlie's wife set a festive table for our celebration of the 4th of July.

And the most delicious shrimp gumbo I think I've ever had!

Beautiful gardens, a new place to sit and swing with that darling P.C. and delicious food.  It's been a charmed week.  Hope that you too had the blessings of good friends, good food and beauty all around.  Take care of each other wonder ones until next week!

One more of Charlie's beautiful garden to see you into the weekend.