We’re in summer mode!

Today I think I discovered we have some yellow butterfly weed growing on the rise behind the house. As far as I know, all the butterfly weed I’ve seen previously was orange. I was today year’s old when I learned there is a yellow butterfly weed (or I may have it confused with hoary puccoon). Two of the regular, orange, butterfly weed plants appear to have survived the winter and are now blooming. Almost all the poison ivy I sprayed a week or ten days ago is looking very sickly. Once we get a cooler, drier spell, I’ll spray some that I seem to have missed or that grew since I sprayed.

Butterfly-weed (Asclepias tuberosa)

Photo by J. Harrington

Now that we’re living in a city (Chisago), that was annexed from the township (Lent) we used to live in, the city started mowing roadsides today in our area. (It’s not legal before August first outside a city.) Most of the township merged with Stacy and even though we ended up in Chisago, our mailing address remained in Stacy. Go figure!

Anyhow, today is the day I trimmed around our mail box, because the city skipped mowing close to it. Getting the weed whacker started in the heat and humidity was a treat, but once started it worked fine. (Another reason to convert to all electric yard tools.) I’ll whack around some flower beds tomorrow and the day after, if it’s not raining. All the rain that’s fallen the past several weeks has the Anoka Sand Plain section behind our house bursting with wildflowers. I don’t recall it ever looking so pretty in the quarter century we’ve been here.

Since I wore myself out with unaccustomed yard work this morning, I’m signing off until tomorrow. It’ll take awhile for me to get acclimated to the heat and “homditty.”

Wildflowers

By Reginald Gibbons

Coleridge carefully wrote down a whole page

of them, all beginning with the letter b.

Guidebooks preserve our knowledge

of their hues and shapes, their breeding.

Many poems have made delicate word-chimes—

like wind-chimes not for wind but for the breath of man—

out of their lovely names.

At the edge of the prairie in a cabin

when thunder comes closer to thump the roof hard

a few of them—in a corner, brittle in a dry jar

where a woman’s thoughtful hand left them to fade—

seem to blow with the announcing winds outside

as the rain begins to fall on all their supple kin

of all colors, under a sky of one color, or none.

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