presents

For her birthday, Leah's Aunt Juju, Uncle Will, and cousins Caroline and Jamesy sent her two wonderful books: The 101 Dalmations, and The Cricket in Times Square. To continue the weekend-long celebration, on Saturday we went with Nannah to a shop that sells toys, furnishings, and art, all handcrafted by senior citizens. Leah carefully chose two dogs -- Missy and Lucky -- and a wooden nightlight. Nannah also gave her a vintage autograph book and a musical card.

Now it's Sunday, and we're all feeling a tad lazy. The heat has returned, but earlier this morning, Neal and I managed to fill a wire egg basket with maypops and marigolds before heading back inside.

As I write, I'm watching the underbelly of a small lizard twist and turn on the windowscreen outside. In our old house, we once found a lizard in the bathroom windowsill, so we set up a habitat of sorts. We never captured it, but we placed some shallow dishes of water, a few sticks and shoots, some smooth stones, and small bits of fruit and insects in the windowsill. It seemed to enjoy sunning itself on the stones and disappearing into the bamboo.

melon surprise revisited

Checking on the wild cantaloupe this morning, I determined that it is actually a watermelon. A few feet away, however, in another patch that sprouted from another day of seed-spitting, there are two much smaller melons coming along, and they are indeed cantaloupes. So while everyone is beginning to look forward to winter squash, we are tending sweet melonfruit. And not just sweet melonfruit, for the biggest surprise of the morning was finding passion fruit growing from a wild passion flower vine in the same area. I cannot wait to make maypop jam!

Being in a fruitful mind, the kids and I finally picked the crabapples that were growing from a small tree at the foot of the drive. I suppose I'll make jam with them as well -- I can't really think of anything else you can do with crabapples, except eat them raw and make a funny face.

The other shots are just some wildflowers we planted a while back. I should explain that all of the pictures you see on my blog were taken using a cell phone. Not that they would look any better if I had used an actual camera, but I like to think that they would.