Beautiful Days in the Neighborhood

I walked around the lakes yesterday and in the cemetery this morning. As I got out of my car yesterday morning, a Cooper’s hawk settled down overhead.  I could hear the soft whirr of a red-bellied woodpecker and, later, the harsher call of a flicker.  Adolescent mallards roamed the lakes, accompanied by a kingfisher, song-sparrow, and great blues.  Yesterday I saw a flotilla of fourteen geese, meaning that at least one set of parents had raised a full clutch, or something close to it, in a lake that is also home to raccoons and snapping turtles.  Their good fortune was apparent this morning where geese feathers littered the ground in two spots near the tiny cemetery pond, evidence of last night’s geese tragedies and great-horned owl or fox triumphs.

 

I went off to the coffee shop/bakery later in the morning for my usual rendevous with a group of friends.  Only one of them had come and she had already left.  A blessing in disguise; I grabbed a gift certificate (something anyone in her right mind would choose over one of my paltry attempts at a meal) and headed off to visit another friend.  Her husband has recently been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of prostate cancer; she has just had the far less serious but certainly traumatizing diagnosis of thyroid cancer.  We sat on her porch for a long time, alternating deeply serious conversation with hysterical laughter over the curve balls life throws at you after you round the base at 50.  I presume that God will help me to produce some semblance of a meal when she goes into the hospital in a couple of weeks for her surgery.  Our girls have been close friends ever since their early-el Montessori days, and I would like to be able to offer some care and comfort to hers.

 

I spent about three hours this afternoon organizing the reservations for a mother-daughter pre-college trip to Prince Edward Island.  I am really hoping that we will be able to pull this one off.  Photographs of the Maritime Provinces have been calling to me for years.  We had been hoping to go to  Europe, but the air fares are beyond outrageous this year.  An airline reservation lady told me that the problem is the cost of fuel.  So , Canada and Anne-of-Green-Gables-Land, here we come!

 

I went to the grocery – now THAT’s a pleasant way to spend an hour on a holiday week-end.  I forgot the tomatoes, but maybe there will be a roadside stand tomorrow with real ones, which the grocery doesn’t have anyway.

 

Tomorrow a friend and I are off to Chautauqua – a moms’ road trip for a day.  Jim Wallis is preaching at the main morning service, so we are looking for a fill-up of liberal evangelical Christianity. (Yes, there is such a thing.)  My daughter has to work from 6:00 a.m. onward tomorrow – shelter animals need to be cleaned up and fed on holiday week-ends, too.  So she and her dad will hold down the fort here, and I should be home late in the evening, in time for a summer bi-weekly gathering of friends on a neighboring porch

 

Midsummer is a very good time. Time is the key word there.  Time to walk, time to visit with friends on porches, time to take trips, time to drive two hours to hear a sermon.  A time of respite, even in the midst of difficult real life stuff.