I love Summer. Always have.  My first memories of Summer is playing with my brothers in the yard on the swing set I believe Daddy had built.  It was made of wood which is why I believe he built it. I would sit in a swing on that swing set waiting for the school bus to bring my brothers and sister home from school.  Under the big walnut tree, swinging back and forth and watching for the yellow school bus.  Then when I got to go to school, I looked forward to Summers and all the freedom we had as children on the farm to play and explore and help Daddy and Mother with chores and gardening.

I remember one Summer strolling down the gravel road to my sister’s , who lived just about a quarter of a mile from our house, singing “June is Busting Out All Over” from the musical State Fair.  Dogs walking beside me about half way and then they would turn back and go home.  We always had dogs which is why I think I love dogs so much.  Mother did not have to worry about anything happening to me with the dogs along.  My sister lived across from a big woods and anytime I went to visit her, I always made sure I was home before it got dark because the woods spooked my at night.  I just knew something or someone would run out of them and catch me.

Summer was picking strawberries in the garden, gathering eggs,  helping Daddy with the hay bailing by helping put the bales in the big red barn.  He would drive the tractor and wagon stacked with hay bales in through the big center doors of the barn and my brothers would throw the bales up into the hayloft.  I would help by dragging the bales to where they were to be stacked using a kind of hook to grab the bales.  Summer was hours of badminton,  weeding in the garden, playing with new kittens in the barn, playing baseball in the barnyard and taking hikes with my brothers.  It was time for swinging in the porch swing kicking it back and forth as I read a library book.  Playing hide and go seek and kick the can and battle stations( a game my brothers made up where we ran  every time we saw a car coming down our road.) Oh, Summers were wonderful.  It was catching lightening bugs in jars and taking the jar to my bedroom at night and watching them flicker off and on.  It was swimming in the little pond my brothers made by damming up a little stream that ran through my Daddy’s woods.  I never thought of snakes or anything else in the water, it just was fun to play in it. It was playing Davy Crockett at an old cabin behind Daddy’s farm where my brothers and their friends threw walnuts at each other as I hid in the cabin pretending they were Davy Crockett fighting the Indians.

My mother was a gardener and I got the gardening gene from her.  I love the flowers of Summer.

We have had so much rain the flowers have grown big and blowzy  all over the back yard.  See the new fence David is building to keep Molly Marshmallow out of the garden?  It almost disappears with all the flowers around it

Bonnie stays near the water bucket on these hot Summer days.  She is twelve years old this Summer.   Seems like we just got her as a pup.

And what does Miss Molly Marshmallow have in her mouth?  I hope it isn’t another baby rabbit.  She keeps all wildlife out of our backyard which probably is a good thing with all the flowers and vegetables growing there.

It’s pretty big, isn’t it?

It’s her chew bone that weighs about two pounds and she carries it around like it was nothing, but as long as she is chewing on it, she isn’t chewing on something she mustn’t.

Because it has been raining so much, I have had some time in my shop working on a few projects.

This barn quilt.

A chicken in the barn door.

Chickens marching across my shop.

And more chickens.

I especially love this polka dot chicken.  Everyone needs a polka dot chicken.

 

Or two.

I bought a retractable clothes line, they call it a dryer. Ha.  Just have to find some place to hang it now.  I have yearned for the smell of sheets fresh off the line on our bed for a long time.  I will just have to hang them where Molly Marshmallow cannot get to them.

I baked bread the other day in tiny loaves.  Six of them.  Three were regular bread and the other three were these….

Cinnamon bread.  Yum, yum and yum.  It didn’t last long around here with David’s sweet tooth, or mine for that matter.  I plan to bake again this Saturday.

I will leave you with a picture of a big spider web that was built at the top of our back door.  Big enough for David to walk into.  And a poem.

COBWEBS

By E.L.M. King

Between me and the rising sun,

This way and that the cobwebs run;

Their myriad wavering lines of light

Dance up the hill and out of sight.

 

There is no land possesses half

So many lines of telegraph

As those the spider-elves have spun

Between me and the rising sun.

Bye.