Spring Picture Post

I have not made a simple picture post in a long time. So let’s see where this takes us.

Elv brought flowers home for me yesterday. A big, luscious bouquet of red and white roses with lovely floral and green foliage. The roses are fragrant and firm so I’ll have this bouquet on the table for a week or longer.

The wintergreen berries and leaves are the only green showing on the forest floor just now that the snow is gone. Kristine, Sawyer, and I have been seeing this on our daily walks. Sawyer finally figured out that it’s fun to walk too, carrying a “walking stick” like Grandpa’s, noticing stuff along the road and lagging behind to poke at things instead of just riding along with Mom pushing the stroller.

I have been getting two walks in each day. It’s a good thing because living in a small two-room cabin doesn’t provide much exercise at all.

Last Sunday we practiced our safer@home, social distancing lolling in our hammock and lawn chair, picnicking and canoeing on Cheney Lake, a remote little-known gem of blue up in the barrens north of Hayward. The water is deep and clear, a blue bowl with sandy shores surrounded by oak scrub, jack pine, blueberry bush, and poplar trees. This has been a Graber family picnic, swimming, fishing, and canoeing destination for more than twenty years. We have often stayed all day until the Whip-poor-wills sing their twilight songs.

So, we decided that we would try to tune in to whatever our church had going on by Zoom from the lake. Let’s just say that Zoom meetings are not the most stellar of ways to have church. Elv and I have no end of trouble with the program. Clumsy and second rate.

Frankly, I miss church, intensely. I miss the singing. And ladies Sunday School class, and the quiet rustling of the waiting people before the service begins. The rows of children reciting their memory work. The earnest delivery of a good sermon, well studied and thought out. Dru enjoys preaching and so we enjoy listening. Oh, it’s going to be nice to gather at our little white chapel for worship and fellowship again!

Our first daffodils are blooming. So it must be time to plant the garden. Spring work and planting have never been more welcome than this year. Unprecedented, I think, is the word we’re hearing a lot in reference to what’s going on these days.