Sunday Stroll

After an extremely busy day yesterday, it was nice to slow down today. I had a leisurely cup of hazelnut coffee before getting ready for church. Church was good too! Our pastor preached a sermon about embracing all -- our church's vision and truthfully, something I'm not so good at sometimes. After church it was our annual Safe Church Policy review. Powerful stuff, but oh so important when you have many families from many walks of life and family situations.

One of the children spent the afternoon at a friend's house, and the Engineer was working on a project, so the remaining three kids and I went for a walk. It's hasn't rained here for weeks and this is the first time this year that I have put two weeks (hopefully more) between the lawn cutting.

The stream is dried up although the ground is still as the kids termed it -- mushy. We discovered that there are two apple trees that hang over the stream, bearing what looks to be golden delicious apples(??). Sadly they'd all already fallen from the tree and were soft and mushy. A of chickadee expressed his disgust at our disturbing his peaceful afternoon and followed us for a bit, all the while chirruping and scolding us for going down to the stream bed.

Autumn is beginning to wrap her beauty among the shrubs, and flowers along the fence rows. The purple asters are at their height and the golden rods are almost past theirs. The sumacs are beginning to catch fire as is the ever invasive, but oh-so-beautiful-in-the-fall Virginia creeper.

We discovered that we will have lots of raspberries for picking if the first frost doesn't come too early. I hope there might even be enough to make raspberry jam.

As we strolled across our not so green lawn, we saw a swallowtail greedily feeding on the black knight butterfly bush.

I am glad to see that the butterflies have not already disappeared yet, for earlier we saw cabbage whites and monarchs dancing in the breeze as we wound our way though the clover in the field around our property.