I have no desire to cuddle fake bread, but if that was real? Pass the butter baby!
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Fox and chucks are still munching happily together. Guess this is what happens when you lay out an ample backyard buffet.
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I’ve been getting hundreds of junk emails lately. Somehow, someone got my address and has been flooding me with spam. ‘Stuck poop’ is an interesting enough subject line but the fact that the word ‘solder’ is in the sender’s address?
Priceless.
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This is what’s left of the pretty yellow deer proof flower I planted out back. The deer may not like it, but clearly the woodchucks did .
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Ditto that for coneflower leaves.
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I had to dig up the phlox, lupine and mallow due to voracious woodchuck appetites….
So now they’re all crowding my deck table in pots.
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The neighbor I was cat sitting for returned from vacation and brought me a thank you gift from the Wisconsin Dells.
A bag of local beer! She knows I like sours and brought me a variety to try. Some of them are wonderfully bizarre. The lime green can? A pastry sour with peach, basil, graham cracker and vanilla.
Now that the driveway replacement is complete, it’s time to battle the ditch from Hell.
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This feature has been the bane of my husband’s existence ever since we moved to this house 21 years ago.
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It runs the full length of our property on both sides of the driveway and was dug (illegally as it turns out) by the previous owner.
Our neighbors on the left don’t have a ditch.
Our neighbors on the right don’t have a ditch.
The farm across the street doesn’t have a ditch… but we have a ditch that over the years has been caving in, filling up with gravel and broken road tar and becoming a nightmare to mow, weed whack and kept clean.
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My husband had the grass growing all the way to the road until the town in their infinite wisdom decided to scrape the sides down to gravel last year.
This increased the caving in by making it more unstable to snow plows and mail trucks that ride on top.
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Needless to say we’d had enough of maintaining said ditch and asked the driveway company what it would cost to lay perforated pipe the entire length and cover it with dirt we could seed and mow a flat lawn all the way to the road.
We were told nothing could be done until we had a signed permit. So we went to the town… who told us to go to Maine public works.
So we went to Maine public works… who told us to go the state DOT.
So we went to the state DOT… who told us to go to the town.
After a week and a half of this insanity I wanted to repeatedly stab myself with a fork… but my husband figured marching up to the capitol and finding the head man would be more productive. So that’s what he did. He found the guy who’s in charge of every single road in the state. He explained the situation and arranged for this overworked fellow to visit our property in order to give permission for us to fill in our ditch.
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Head guy came, head guy looked, head guy listened, and said he had to talk to legal.
A week later head guy called with a denial.
To which we wanted to say…
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The lame excuse he gave was this…. if he granted permission for us to fill in the ditch, who’s to say the next owner wouldn’t want up dig it out again.
What the …. what?
Who cares!
To pacify my irate husband, he agreed to visit us again with a proposal that the state could come and dig out the ditch, build up the sides and make it more stable… at their cost. Which sounds good in theory but in reality would just put us back to where we were 21 years ago with a steeper ditch that’s harder to keep clean. And I hate to say it, but we aren’t getting any younger.
I’ve been cat sitting for our neighbors this week.
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They live one door over and down behind us near the river. They’re also the neighbors who had their driveway redone the same time we did. It’s an absolute joy to ride down there now.
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Pia greets me at the door upon arrival. She never used to, but has come realize I am the bringer of food when mom is away… so I am tolerated now.
I saw these weirdos in the fruit department of our local grocery and knew I had to try them.
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Called pineberries, they’re really just a pale pink variant of strawberry but I figured they’d look nice on the fruit platter I make every weekend for healthy munching in the man cave.
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Sorry to say I detected no hints of pineapple, pear or apricot.
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They’re basically a harder anemic strawberry. So while they did add an interesting aesthetic… I doubt I’ll be buying them again.
If you’re a long time reader you know my husband and I met and married in six days. He was on leave from the Marine Corps and came home to be with his family at Christmas. It was a hard time for him as the Beirut bombing was a few months before and he was deployed to the area at the time. On that horrible day he volunteered to help with the rescue efforts after a 12 hour night shift and no sleep. He took 5 bodies out of that building… some whole, some in pieces.
I’m sure all he wanted at that point was rest and relaxation. What he got was a wife.
We met. We fell in love. We got married six days later. And to be honest we would have done it sooner but we had to wait 2 days for the license.
Everyone thought we were crazy.
Some thought I was pregnant… which was even crazier.
But 39 years later here we are.
Our wedding took place at a Justice of the Peace office during a raging N’Or East blizzard. We were staying with his mother on the Island at the time and had to take a boat to the mainland in the storm. I wore a pink cashmere sweater and dove grey slacks with high heeled boots. There was no dress, no cake, no reception, no gifts. We had 3 witnesses. My mother, his mother and his step father. There was a champagne brunch at a lovely waterfront restaurant… period. We had to leave the next day and drive to North Carolina so he could report back to base.
I was never one of those young girls who dreamt of big fancy weddings. I’ve been to many of them that cost more than our first home, and you know what? Every single one of those couples is divorced. For me, the ceremony isn’t the important part. It’s the love and commitment that mean something.
We may not have an engraved sterling silver turkey baster or a drunken video of Uncle Ted giving a toast….. but we’re still in love and still happily married almost four decades later.
If there’s anyone who puts on a better show in a garden than a peony, I haven’t yet met them.
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For a pure burst of color they’re hard to beat.
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I have a few small plants in the front of the house, but it’s this old backyard beauty that was here when we moved in 20 years ago that makes the biggest statement.
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Peonies can be fussy and hard to establish.
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But if you manage it, they’re carefree beauty that will be enjoyed for decades.
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Where there's only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
River's world..... 