May-be summer’s coming

While watching for signs of spring I’ve potted herbs on my windowsill…

I snipped a sprig of budding larch to put at the sink for an ever present reminder that spring is upon us.

A bright host of Playmobil people came to visit from a Banff Rummage Sale…

And the moment that flowers appeared at the Garden Center, I bought them! –though they had to hunker down inside for days and weeks while nighttime temps continued to dip to nearly freezing and daytime temps resembled late fall more than late spring!

Mother’s Day intervened, and painting helped

And I discovered that ‘living lettuce’ from the grocery store can be eaten and then the rootball planted!  And voila two weeks later–more lettuce to eat!  My own literal kitchen garden!

And just this weekend the weather began to turn and I had a happy ramble up Tunnel Mountain in Banff for further proof that summer may be coming.

The timing couldn’t have been better.  As I started up the trail a small group of people were huddled looking into the  trees.

There we spied a mother elk having just given birth to a wobbly-legged little one.  He was just getting to his feet as I headed by. An hour later when I returned down the mountain he was toddling about in a little sunlit space on the side of the mountain, getting a feel for his legs!  Too precious!

The mountain-top was lovely. Flowers underway. Even a belated Prairie Crocus ( :

I am breathing easier now. Spring has hatched.

The Cascade Gardens are still mostly rock and fountain, but one of these days there will be flowers as if they had never disappeared…

And my own flowers have now spent their first night camping out alone and have lived to tell the story…

———And that has been our month of May!

I will leave you with our latest rendition of Granola Bars.  Around here we’ve been scaling back on ultra sweets like the regular batches of Chocolate Chip Cookies and Brownies that used to be a staple. We are experimenting with getting happy energy instead from homemade granola bars, which have been surprisingly easy to concoct!

The hardest part will be deciphering my writing ) :

All for now!

May you overflow with hope as summer’s sun comes back to brighten your world and the Son of Righteousness reveals Himself in your days…

-Linda

Sure signs of fall’s approach…

The first snowfall is visible on top of the Grotto range this morning–when I can get a glimpse of it through the blankets of cloud cover!  And… the elk have mustered the courage to graze on my doorstep by night, eliminating all my violas and pansies, leaving me with my bedraggled snapdragons and hardy marigolds.  T-shirt temperatures have plunged to necessitate extra layers for the send-off of summer.  And I am plucking from this month’s archives some of its finer moments…

 

We live in old Coal Mining Territory and every once in a while you run across a reminder…

 

The skies have one glory, the flowers another…

Grotto Canyon…

I’ve been taking a closer look at all manner of flowers (and weeds!) this month…

   

This little love-ly is the sweet smelling, evening-bloomer, white cockle. Bane to farmers, and banned from our yards, but not from my sketchbook ( :

Another banned blessing to bumblebees…

The old goat has lost his beard…

Late summer’s bounty–wild raspberries!

And some strange insipid white ones…

And in the city, wildly brilliant crabapples!

We’ve endured a LOT of smoke this month which lends a certain mystique to the mountains but other than that has been an unwelcome result of lightning-lit fires throughout BC.

This too shall pass with the approach of fall and its close kin, winter.

I am happy to have preserved some flowers from summer’s bounty!

–LS

For the beauty of the earth, 
for the glory of the skies, 
for the love which from our birth 
over and around us lies. 

For the wonder of each hour 
of the day and of the night, 
hill and vale and tree and flower, 
sun and moon and stars of light… 

Refrain: 
Christ, our Lord, to you we raise 
this, our hymn of grateful praise. 

–Folliott Sandford Pierpoint (1864)

 

 

 

 

He has arrived!!!

The timing was perfect. I’d booked my flight before the announcement came, but just just two days after baby arrived so did my flight!

Then happy surprise–at the ferry dock, for the sailing across to Powell River, the brand-new Salish Orca pulled up for her maiden passenger voyage!  I couldn’t have timed that better.  And so a once-mundane crossing became a time of exploration and picture-taking to capture all the newness…

But the real bit of eagerness and wonder lay just ahead… my daughter’s first baby–a strapping 8 1/2 + pound boy with a toddler’s head-full of dark hair,
just waiting to be whisked home from the hospital ( ;

And oh how captivating…

What an expressive little tot at just over a week old!

For eight days I got to hang around watching JAXON take in his new world,

and finding great delight myself in the world all a-bloom there…

 

 

 

It was SO good to be back ‘home’–for visits and walks with friends and quiet sits in the sun by the sea…

 

The crossing back to the airport was a melancholy one as I sat watching the shoreline diminish… where now three daughters and one precious grandbaby reside…

But the Lord worked it out that there would be friends on the other side too who would host me for the afternoon and see me off at day’s end…

And I needn’t even have dreaded my return to the bleak-slow-to-waken-after-winter prairies.  For in my absence spring had come here too!

 

We serve a glorious King who lavishes us all our days with grace upon grace!

–LS

 

God has made everything beautiful in its time!

 Eccl. 3:11 ESV