The walk starts out in the living room. Yesterday we added a couch to our two love seats, which you can just see in the lower right corner. We had friends over for pizza last night and we had to point out the new couch to them later in the evening. It fit in so well that it seemed like it must have always been there, which is a good sign. Now all I need to do is finish hooking up the chimney on the new wood stove and we'll be ready to hunker down and enjoy the fall and winter.
The early sun gilding the living room.
Stepping out the front door, the steps down into the yard are flanked on both sides by natural prairie plants, as if standing at attention for review.
Each week or two the selection of blooming plants changes. If I knew them as well as Becky, I could probably use them instead of the calendar to mark the passage of summer.
The tulip poplar vies with an oak on the northwest of the house for the designation of "favorite tree". I think of it as the "resurrection tree". It was struck by disease many years ago and died. The following year I was going to cut the corpse down, but before I could get to that a new shoot came up from the stump ... and that shoot has turned into this beautiful specimen. I doesn't like Roundup and when Roundup is sprayed on the field across the road from us, the tree suffers a shock. (According to the local farmers, "Roundup doesn't drift" - rrrriiiiiight. We're hoping it will be hardy enough to be a survivor.
Even the mushrooms that grow out of the mulch have a beauty of their own.a
This is the view from the guest parking leading up the curved path to the house. We especially love the grasses on either side of the path behind the milk cans. They look like a fog of grass seeds, waving in the breeze.
Milkweed pods. Milkweed is, well, a weed. But it happens to be the one plant that monarch butterflies prefer, so we rejoice over every one that we find.
Barns seem so timeless. The waning moon is in the upper left. I was up in the night briefly and the moon was so bright it cast shadows across the yard behind the house.
In April this view of the house showed a house on a rocky dirt hill. Now the grass is filling in and the young trees have leafed out. Next year it will look like the house has always been sitting on a grassy rise.
As the sun creeps over the meadows and fields it casts a golden sheen over everything. The land is so flat that the sky dominates the view.
The old Nettle Creek gently winds its way from west to east across the farm. Thanks to the good rains it continues to flow, though we're already past mid August.
Here we look from the cement "bridge" west.
Even the silver maple north of the barn seems charming in the morning sun. Hostas outline the north side of the barn.
This picture is for Micah and Lucas, who spent hours playing here at the "west creek" crossing. It's so full of water that it looks almost like a little pond.
The natural grasses give way to Steve Larson's beans in the west field.
The ducks are out and around for the morning. We've been eager to see what mix of male and female we have. It looks like two drakes and five females. The big question for us is whether they will stay with us or migrate when winter comes. (Becky is hoping for "migrate". No need to feed 7 more mouths (bills?) through the winter, when they could join others of their kind and feed themselves in warmer climes.
As I near the end of my walk, I see two of my favorite girls, animatedly gazing out the front door and discussing what the first gardening projects should be in the coming year. Next year there will be new flowers to enjoy and care for.
Thursday I'm back in the classroom after about 10 years. It'll be good to be involved with students again.
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