Sun Dappled Mornings

Dappled.  Isn't that a great word?  It conjures up images of speckled ponies and shady grass with the sun glinting through.  Lazy days at Grandma's house lying around her yard and looking up at the sky through the branches of the trees.  Were they ash?  Elm?  Poplar?  I don't remember.  But I loved my grandma's yard, and the sound of the wind in those trees, and the shade and sun playing across the lawn, and the green and blue when I looked up into the sky.

Right now the shade from my hanging basket of petunias is dappling the white wicker chair across the porch from me.  As it sways in the very gentle breeze, the shadow shifts and shudders into an every-changing show of white and gray.

Adjacent to the wicker chair is a planter into which I did not put any pretty plants this spring.  It's a biggish planter, so I don't move it for the winter.  It sits through all the cold and gray of winter, and waits for good things to come its way in the spring.  But this year it didn't get any colorful plantings.

At first.

In spite of not having discretionary funding to use on pretty potted plants this year, my big porch planter has now had some good things come its way. 

One of the projects the kids made in VBS the other week was these decorative garden stakes.  They are cute as can be.  Since I had six little ones in VBS, I have six garden stakes.  So instead of sticking them in the dirt here and there around my gardens, I tucked them all into my big front porch planter to make a bouquet of my children's colorful handprint flower blossoms.  It's fun to see as I sit and have my coffee.

Beyond the porch railing, and further yet beyond the southern perimeter of the yard, the neighbors' hay field is looking beautiful in the sunlight of this summer morning.  The round bales are scattered across the landscape.  They have dried from the grayish green with which they pop out of the baler, to a soft golden hue.  The new growth of the alfalfa is coming up a fresh green around them.  This particular view is one of the great blessings of living where we do. 

(I have only the webcam on my laptop this morning.  I tried to take a photo of the above scene, but the quality was not lovely enough to want to share.  If you use your imagination with the above description, you'll end up with a finer end product than my camera and photographic skills could produce.)

The bees are buzzing all around me, and the birds are twittering in the trees.  I can hear the kids starting to stir in the house, which means it's time to start to think about getting things rolling.  We have 11:00 church this morning, so there is no real rush.  But somehow, it always ends up in a rush by the time 11:00 rolls around.  The most likely culprit:  too much sitting on my porch to enjoy the view.