Porch Time Thinking

53°f or about 12°C this a.m., partly cloudy and windy. No rain came as forecast, thank goodness! Flood cleanup has begun in the affected areas, and even our mud is drying up. Yay!

Peeking through the cherry tree on this pretty day.

Larry has gone to town and I am enjoying coffee on the porch and the soft wind and sun. Later today we will have the eclipse that the media seem to have wound up to be a major event. Well, of course it is a big deal, but it seems like this time people have gone crazy about it.

The eclipse starts here around 2pm and will be 95% totality, which is plenty for me. I have eclipse glasses stowed away in one of my memory boxes from the 2017 event, but I don't plan to dig them out or try to look at the sun. I will just enjoy the unusual darkness...maybe our bats will come out? That would be cool. Right now the light is clear and so pretty.

So green! Sometimes I think Ireland has nothing on West Virginia when it comes to shades of green.

I divided up the hams I bought for a sinfully low price last week (99 cents a pound for spiral cut honey hams!) and vacuum-sealed them for the freezer. I do this every year, and usually have enough ham to get us through the summer. It is nice to have on hand when we have visitors too, as potato salad or the like, a tossed salad and rolls and there's a quick and easy dinner. Got 8 nice packages from one ham, one being the hambone which I save for beans or soup.

We have bags of mulch stacked up and Larry is getting more today. It has been too wet to spread it, but this afternoon I should be able to get a lot of it spread. In my little greenhouse the Savoy cabbage has sprouted but no action yet in the other pots. The garden has been a bog, so I can't get in there to plant the Stoneham cabbages I bought last week. I do believe we will have a late planting year, but one of the beauties of living where we do is that we have a long growing season, so there is plenty of time. The seeds I planted a few weeks ago are slowly coming up so we will have some early veggies anyway.

My sweet young neighbor picked up a cherry bush for me. I had never heard of these but I have had no luck finding a cherry tree so I am delighted to get this bush. The tag says it will produce up to 30 pounds of sweet cherries a year after 3-4 years. Keeping deer and birds away from it will be a challenge, of course,  as it is with so many things here. But there's another of the good things about living here: abundant wildlife. Right now I am absolutely surrounded by birdsong.

This is National Poetry Month, so I have been trying to write a few poems, without much success. Maybe today inspiration will strike? Here is a haiku I wrote during the last full moon. 

blushing moon sinks

as ruddy sun lifts

owl calls his love

About as much as I can manage these days are haiku and other short poems, but better than last year's months-long drought.

Larry just called and he is on our road coming home.  I warned him about our mail carrier, who just left our mailbox. She drives pretty fast and as our road is one-lane with many blind hills and curves, one has to be watchful. Another facet of living out in these hills.

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