Isn’t this wonderful? The child’s happiness just radiates from this sculpture. (Not sure how happy the frog is, though)

Summer is here in Arkansas all of a sudden. The temperatures are soaring, the humidity is rising. Afternoon thunderstorms are forecast almost daily, with or without severe weather. We have had SO much rain this year that one of the next things we need to do is trim out some of the greenery that is trying to close off our driveway. I will drive the truck S-L-O-W-L-Y down one side of the driveway. My husband will ride in the back, yelling at me to stop each time he needs to work an area. He’ll lop things off as well as possible, throwing the debris to the side of the driveway. When we get to the bottom (650 feet down our steep driveway) I’ll drive to the church, turn around and then go UP the other side of the driveway. We have SO much this year that we will probably need to do this several times before it is reasonably clear.

Ironically, one of the next pressing things is to get our irrigation system for the yard on, tested, repaired where we have blowouts, and schedule to run. Our rain will probably shut off one of these days, like Mother Nature turned off the faucet, and things will dry up and die fast.

I’ll spread out the black plastic we had on the floor of the greenhouse, trying to get the remaining plastic to dry enough that the mud will fall off. Right now the mud and rain makes it weigh a TON. I think that once it is dry enough, I can get the remains into two more leaf bags. Then I’ll spread grass seed on the bare area that was under the plastic and clean things up. And the dismantling of my beloved greenhouse will be finished. I’m disappointed that I wasn’t able to make it work. It was too cold or too hot 99 percent of the time. We did what we could, with barrels of water warmed up by the sun, plus a space heater on a LONG extension cord in the winter, and extra fans and as much cross breeze as we could get in the summer. I think we could have made it work if we could have afforded to fully heat and cool it. Maybe we can try again if we win the lottery or the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes.

One thing we were looking for over 30 years ago now when we were looking for land on which to build our home, was running water (a brook, or stream, or even a pond.) We couldn’t find that and ‘settled for” the top of a ridge line with a terrific view of two more ridge lines behind us and the valley in-between. If we had been able to find the water, maybe I could still find the childhood joy of catching a frog…