Glimpsing Summer- May 2025

I picked these beauties from my “flower yard” outside our one room school house. We have four dogs, a shifting number of cats, and free-range chickens, when the foxes aren’t forcing them into the coop protection program. As you can imagine, this causes a fair amount of stress on flowers, because, who knew, cats LOVE to sleep in rose bushes. A few years ago I got fed up with the dogs digging into the flower beds looking for who-knows-what, and my sons helped me put up a makeshift fence around the front of the school house.

            It worked. Mostly…

            I’ve yet to find anything that keeps the chickens and cats out. Even thorns on the rose bushes.

            Each year I add to the madness. Another rosebush, bulbs, randomly scattered flower seeds. If personality trait testing were based on flower garden arrangement, I think my pattern of planting and sowing would put me somewhere in the deranged shade of the test. But to me, that’s the beauty of it. All those flowers, grass, and dwarf lilac bushes just growing like wild, the smell of blooms enticing me to sit in the shade of the big maple towering above and rest peacefully for a minute.

            At least until the chickens find me.

            Another important task of the flower yard is to attract the hummingbirds. I love to entice them to our yard, the huge maples, the flowers, and on a good year, they’ll nest in the trees. One year I had so many, they hardly let me take down the feeders to refill them. They’d follow along beside me to the door into the house, then hover close until I returned. I wait all winter and spring to hear the thrumming hum of their wings announcing their return.

            I see glimpses of coming summer- the weather is nice and mild, slowly shifting into hot. By the end of the week it will be close to 100 degrees around these parts, and I’m quickly recalling all of my usual summer schedules. Soon, it will be too hot for me to write in the morning. I will instead rise before 5 so horses are fed and ready to saddle at 6. We’ll eat breakfast before we head out. We’ll ride as many as we can, then bring them back over the hill from our arena for baths and turnout. If there’s time before lunch, I’ll mow or work in the garden.

            In the afternoon, I’ll work outside until it gets too hot, then I’ll head in and work on writing stuff. Actual writing, book keeping, ordering, blogging, shipping, you name it. Recently, the feedlot we provided yardage for closed. It left me adrift for a while. Perhaps I still am to a certain extent. We still have our cow/calf pairs, but it seems odd not to plan a portion of my day around riding pens. Oh, not that I can’t find other things to keep me occupied. I can without even looking around. It just feels different when something that dictates so much of your day is suddenly…well…gone.

            I do suppose that God narrowed my channel of focus on purpose. I don’t guess my entire reason for existing was to sort fats out of feedlot pens. Now, I focus on the writing. It’s a bit of a scary feeling knowing that my pen is now my bread and butter. But I often think to myself- what if I could? What if I made this my mainstay? I feel this summer is poised on the cusp of something. Something grand, something scary. Let’s label it a new beginning.

            As I welcome summer and her strenuous commitments of schedules, heat, and constant weed whacking, I try not to force it gone too quickly. My oldest is seventeen, and each summer that fades into memory is one more I can’t get back. I’m one of those moms who mistakenly thought when he was an infant he’d take at least thirty years to advance into toddlerhood, and depressingly find it took but a moment for all that and subsequent years to pass. I long for the days when I sat beside the pool during swimming lessons and wondered if they’d ever float by themselves. Now, as teenagers, the kids are so busy I wonder if its worth setting up our backyard pool each summer.   

            Perhaps that’s why I enjoy the hummingbirds so much. Each year they return. Eventually we’ll probably build a garage over the pool pad. Another piece of childhood will be gone, and the afternoon hours of diving for pennies in the pool with Rosie will be as well. But the hummingbirds will return each year.

            So, tomorrow, as I head out to plant another rosebush and my tomatoes and peppers, I’ll be thinking ahead- to when those lovely veggies are ready for picking. My favorite feeling is coming in at lunch on a hot day to decide what I’ll make for the noon meal and rummaging in the garden for anything ripe and ready to eat. I’ll turn on my little boom box and listen to the soundtrack to A River Runs Through It, composed by Mark Isham, and dream of the mountains.

            You should try it sometime. That album kept me company as I wrote Unconquered Horses. The music made the Big Horns come alive. Remind me- I’ll blog about the Big Horns sometime. Oh, there’s a story there, of me, the Big Horns, and, you guessed it- summer time.

God bless-

Lyn