How does your garden grow?

My boss has the most beautiful yard and garden! He and his wife are out working in it for hours at a time, and you can sure tell by how gorgeous it all looks. It's like entering a different world when you walk through the gate and venture down the stone paths. Everywhere you look there's something different to marvel.

Gorgeous flowers, lushly thick green grass, ivy, statues and ornaments, birdhouses, yard art hanging here and there along the fences and from iron posts, even a rusty old bicycle parked amongst it all, with a flower-filled basket hanging from the handlebars.

They have a beautiful stone pond with water gurgling and trickling a musical tune and raised beds out back filled with all their vegetables. Cabbage, spinach, tomatoes, beans, potatoes. Everything you can imagine! He has bamboo poles that he harvested and dried in the rafters of his barn and he positions them into teepee's and grows beans and sweet peas up them. He has rocks and carefully-placed stumps with pots of flowers here and there, and boxes he made that hang along the gate and fences filled with bright colored masses.

The yard is filled with trees and flowering bushes and shrubs and every kind of flower imaginable. Lilacs, irises, petunias, peonies, tulips, azaleas, lavender, poppies, daisies, clematis, wisteria. Purple, red, white, yellow, pink and blue. All the colors of the rainbow everywhere you look.

He has several different roses in pinks and yellow and red and everything grows so lushly and abundantly. What a wonderful haven for all the butterflies and bunnies too! God has blessed their hands with the magic touch because the whole yard just flourishes with beauty.

I hope someday I can have such a beautiful garden at my home to escape to. What a peaceful place they have created and how proud they are to share it with all of us!

Good Vibrations

Boy have we had some doozy storms so far this Spring. We had a big one whip through last night around 2:00 a.m. and it kept us up well into the early morning, as two more bouts came through one right after another.

Our poor dog Tubby is just scared to death of the storms. When the wind starts blowing and the thunder starts booming, you'd think it was the end of the world by the way he acts. Last night when the first crack of lightning shook the house, poor little Tubby jumped up in bed with us quicker than Jumpin' Jack Flash! He crawled in between the two of us and started shaking like a leaf. It felt like our bed had turned into one of those fancy vibrating beds the hotels have! We couldn't calm him down at all. His eyes were glued to the nearest window and every time he saw a flash light up the sky, he started shaking even more because he knew that boom was right behind it. Poor little guy.

He hates it even more when the weather person is on the screen and all those colored maps are tracking the storm. He watches that tv with his head bobbing up and down like he can understand what they are saying. You just wonder what all the thoughts are going through his head.

But since it's just now April and May is right around the corner, I imagine we'll have plenty more storms to come to liven up the household. I just hope poor Tubby can endure it without giving himself an ulcer.

Wish upon a firefly. . .

Last night when I took Tubby out for his evening walk around the yard, I spotted the first firefly of the season! I treat the first firefly sighting like you do when you wish upon the first star in the night sky. You make a wish real quick and then hope it comes true before the summer's end.

I looked all around the yard, but this one single firefly was the only one flitting around, blinking his bottom on and off in the dark. I've heard this is how fireflies call their mates, by blinking on and off in the dark, so I imagined him flying around calling "Fiona! Where are you? It's me, Freddie, your long lost love!"

I sat on the porch steps and waited for Tubs to do his business, and thought about fireflies and where they went during the colder months and how was it they knew when to come back? And what makes their rear ends light up like that? They are so fascinating and magical and when they cover the lawn and trees and bushes, they look like tiny, bright twinkle lights.

Summer must be coming early this year and I can't wait for Freddie to find Fiona and all the other fireflies to come out and dance in our yard!

A Country Drive

These are the things I saw on my drive to work this morning. . . One lone turkey Tom with his tail feathers fanned out, prancing in a field and calling for a mate. A squirrel running along a fence with a nut in his mouth. Kids waiting for the bus in the rain with their raincoats and umbrellas. Pink and white dogwood trees blooming everywhere. A beautiful green field with five deer eating their grassy breakfast. Three tiny black-and-white spotted calves standing in a pasture. A long fence row lined with tulips blooming in red, yellow, white and purple. A duck sitting on a fence in the rain! Had to do a double-take on that one! Two starlings taking a bath in a mud puddle on the side of the road. Purple red bud trees blooming, surrounded by green green green everywhere. What a beautiful way to start the day! Happy Spring!