summer

Most of you will probably finish that line with “… lemons, make lemonade.” It’s an old adage about making the best of things, to which I have added my own variation. “When life wakes you up at the crack `o dawn, get up!”

At first, I was really fighting this. For whatever reason, this year and last, I have been waking up with the sun, this year even more so with a bumper crop of birds singing about 40′ from my open bedroom windows. I’m a morning person, but 4:45 am? Come on! But awake I was. I tried going back to sleep, to no avail. I lay there and harrumphed – needless to say, that didn’t help. But I was becoming more and more tired as I was still going to bed at the same time. What to do?

Adjust! I started going to bed about 10, so when 4:45 rolls around, sometimes heralded by the sun, but always by the birds, (clearly I am now synching with their bio-rhythms), I can actually get up and start doing stuff. By the time I start my jobs, I’ve often accomplished quite a bit. Ergo, the photo of the carrot bread.

I got out all the dry ingredients and mixing bowls, loaf pan, etc. last night and grated the carrots. After feeding the small fry this morning, I opened up the windows to a nice cool 65˚, whipped it together and popped it in the oven. Voila! a cooling carrot bread at 7:50 a.m.! By the time you see the finished photo with a cream cheese icing, it will be a few hours later.

Sometimes reality is a pain in the butt. We don’t always want to hear about it, nor deal with it. But the fact remains – whatever the reality is, if it’s not something we can change, it’s not going away. So for now, one of my realities is waking up at 4:45 a.m. And although this was a carrot bread morning, I discovered that this new reality also affords me extra time to work on my children’s books with no interruptions.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll give the little choristers a standing ovation.

As the sun and the earth dance through the Equinox, summer exhales and shares her final gifts.

LastRose2
The last perfect rose of summer blooms, defying the empty, withering stalks of Hosta and drying grass.

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The tall grasses in the backyard bloom in bursts of sunlit wheat.

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The praying mantis I’ve been getting to know, mated, and the next day climbed high up on my office window. That evening she captured and devoured a large moth in the same spot, her last meal. Thereafter, she remained low, near the water spout. I watched, as each day, she became a paler brown and atrophied before my eyes. I thought to take one last picture of her, but could not be so disrespectful as to photograph her as her tiny life faded. In 3 days she was gone, her work on earth completed.

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Despite the temperatures already dipping into the 40’s and 50’s at night, my potted petunias and torenia continue to glow in the afternoon sun, holding their beauty `til the end.