There are quite a few things that are "off" about this summer...the incredibly late start, the towering plants yet small amount of produce the garden has cranked out, the startling amount of water still lingering around our entire state....yet mixed amongst those oddities are unexpected moments of beauty, of normalcy, of routine.

The bees are busy....

...very, very busy....As a sidenote, I did not crouch to take this photo - that's the honest height of my marigolds.


These beautiful little creations still dot our yard. I've decided to give them a break and focus my attacks on the thistles and nightshade. It's hard for me to work up motivation to attack plants that aren't going to hurt me or kill my children and pet. These little guys really just brighten the green space, cause no one any harm, and provide some of the most unexpected beauty a Mommy will ever know. Our table has been adorned with them most of the summer, and they could just as well be bouquets of roses - they mean just as much as they come in scrunched tightly in excited little hands!


Really, I know each little fluff will create thousands of more little yellow annoyances for next spring; still, it's beautiful. This one caught our attention from inside the house during supper as the late summer sun's golden rays sunk low enough to hit our yard at just the right angle to make him glow. I might just eat him if I knew how.



Nearly every year at this time I think about my time as a college student. I can still smell the musty newspapers over which I poured, hour after hour, as the sun exploded into orange and pink outside the library, or as a cold rain drizzled down. I can see each room I lived in - all four of them are still fresh in my mind. I can feel my queasy stomach the day my parents dropped me off for the first time. My hands still remember shaking with first-day-of-class nerves, unsure whether I would have time to run between back-to-back classes across campus, unsure whether this would be the class where my professors realized I really wasn't a top student and had just been faking them out all along, the class in which I finally just couldn't produce quality work. There was an adrenaline rush in all of those uncertainties; it kept me pounding the books all semester long, paper to paper, test to test. As I type, some of the adrenaline rushes back. I love the smell of old books. I loved the rush of final exams. I loved the exhaustion of term papers. I love learning, exploring, writing, proving myself again and again. This time of year, especially, I look back on those years and remember how much I loved about them. I loved them so much I thought they'd be my life.



But I don't remember ever noticing a dandelion. And I know no one ever brought me one.