peak green

we are in peak green right now. while i walked the dog yesterday, i grabbed a leaf from every plant, shrub, and tree that caught my attention. i put them in the press overnight just so they would lie flat. green is the show right now. dense, lush, verdant, abundant. and fleeting. it seems as soon as we hit peak green-ness, it starts to change. the tall prairie  grasses fade to the color of straw and go to seed. the light gets more golden. the yellow daisies and sunflowers profuse. and nature takes on a yellowish cast. right now it seems like too much green, but remember to enjoy this singular season, because it is already turning into something else.

collection of leaves from one walk on july 2, 2022

a new phase

my son left today for a summer internship in washington dc. this is the first time steve and i will be without kids for more than a couple days in 24 years. yes, you read that correctly. eva is 24, and joseph is 18, and we, well, we spent a lot of time together as a family. we took our kids on all our vacations. and we never realized until this week that we  haven’t been without the kids for 24 years. oh yes, they would go away to camp, and go places with school and friends, but never at the same time. our two have a 5½ year age spread, so it was a little bit like raising two only children–they were never in the same school together, so they never had the same schedule. we have always had at least one kid with us for the past 24 years. until today.

pretty desktop debris

rrrrl pretty!

it’s rrrl pretty out there right now. yup, that’s how we say it up here in minnesota. it’s rrrl nice.

northern summer wildflowers

STILL here

the speeding up and slowing down of time gets more pronounced the older you get. june arrived and ended in lightening speed this year. blue bird skies and 80 degree days. long evenings on the deck. uninterrupted lush green foliage creating a canopy over the house and framing our long views of the lake. one day bleeds into the next. it seems the only thing that changed this month was the calling of frogs being replaced by the twinkling of fireflies. it’s months like these that toy with your mind, and make you believe that summer might just last forever.

suspended on a thread

lots and lots of thigh-high roadside grasses right now–a northern summer is a fertile place. what caught my attention with these guys was those heavy seed-heads dangling at the end of those hair-thin filaments. yes, i like prairie grasses almost as much as i like using dashes. 😂

smooth brome grass (Bromus inermis)