A dear friend gave me a foot-long shoot of her Rose of Sharon bush 23 years ago, our first spring here. I estimate it to now be a mature seven feet high and fourteen feet across. It buzzes like a bee hive with apian activity.
This is a very pleasant, little cemetery behind the church at Pere Marquette, near the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. Directly to the east of it is the Pere Marquette State Park campground.
My Willow had her picture in "the Source" newspaper this week, in a wonderful article about the artist, my friend, Kathy Hall. Here she is blowing a kiss to Kathy!
Well, okay, aluminum foil ( swaddling the baking potatoes) is a modern convenience, but Sunday night's meal, cooked over an open campfire, is about as primitive and delicious as one gets.
Yesterday evening my husband built a campfire to cook supper over. He had to get firewood in a wheelbarrow to feed his fire. We found this poor little brown snake in the bottom of the wheelbarrel, crushed during the loading of the firewood. It's very tiny, compared to the stove-size chucks of firewood.
Here's a photo for size comparison with the wood. I wish we had an outdoor wood stove. This is the kind of critter that can come into the house during the winter when we bring in firewood, along with spiders, ants and other creepy-crawlers.
We bought a new hose yester- day. The non-kink kind --- hurray! Added on to the two old hoses we already have, it gets water to the farthest reaches of the garden now.
It's rained buckets every- where but here. The storms and showers seem to split apart before they get to us, going north and south, but leaving us high and dry. Oh, well, I'm building strong muscles carrying water in buckets out to the garden...but it's getting old!