Rainy Summer Days Are Very Welcome!

Gentle rains have started and stopped for a couple of days now at our house, and we are grateful. Gerald's garden plants seem to be taller every time I look out the kitchen window. He brought in the first tomato and a huge head of cabbage. So we had slaw with our hamburgers tonight.

We are most grateful, of course, for the rains on Brian's crops. I imagine Gerald has seen the the corn and soybean fields both days, and he will undoubtedly take me by the first time we are out running around together. Going by fields with Brian's crops is a part of his summer activity. And our friend "Bun" Handkins checks them regularly also. It pleases us to think that someone in his 90s is still involved with life and watching our crops.

Gerald was awake at 4 a.m. and stayed awake until it was time for him to take a friend to an airport in Indiana for the friend to pick up his plane being serviced there. So when Brian called from Lake Saint Louis tonight, Gerald was sound asleep in his comfy chair in front of the TV, which works better than a sleeping pill for him.

I stayed up later than I should have last night reading the fascinating blog of a paraplegic, who has accomplished amazing things. So I was still asleep when the phone rang this morning--very late this morning. A saleswoman was following up on Gerald's first foray into looking for a stone to put on our cemetery lot. We are very proud to have one finally purchased. I was quite horrified when he told me at supper last night what stones cost. Yikes. What a waste of money. I wondered if we could take one of the huge left-over rocks Gerald used for our new rock garden and just bolt a piece of metal on it or something explaining who we are when we die. But our children might not like that, so we will probably be conventional. But I can think of a great many things I'd rather do with that much money than to buy a tombstone--I would love to give it away to all sorts of people and causes. Now that would be fun. I don't see anything fun about spending money on a rock. GRRRR.

For some reason for the first time since we have lived here, we have a bluebird visitor who likes to sit on our upper ledge of our living room windows and look in longingly as if it would like to join us. The baby martins are giving their lungs lots of exercise chirping loudly and flying excitedly all around us as we watch them from the deck. The yellow finches brighten our day as they eat thistleseed from their bag hanging down over the patio. As Pat Evans observed, the rain does not deter the hummingbirds from their feeders. They keep me busy making them sugar water.