I love the Car Guys on public radio.  I’m serious.  I LOVE those guys.  This morning, as I was winding my way home from manure shoveling (don’t tell the leg dr.), they were winding up the show with their usual class:  2 jokes.

A).  Two atoms accidently run into each other.  The first one says, “Hey! Sorry!  You all right?”  The second one says, “No.  I don’t think I am.  I think I lost an electron.”  The first one, distressed says, “You sure about that?”  The second one says, “Yeah.  I’m positive.”

B)  Whad’ya get when you throw a hand grenade into a kitchen?  In France?  (pause courtesy of the Car Guy)  Answer: Linoleum blown apart.  (you have to say it fast)

These are copper roses.  I think of them as blooming in July, but that’s because the blossoms come out all along these long, slender, arched branches, so the bush looks like botanical fireworks.  They actually bloom in late May to early June.  It goes: snow drops and primroses, then forsythia and daffodils, then lilacs and tulips, then copper roses – after that, lilies.

Have I sent this before?  Copper Roses (ours are a little tame).  Behind them the slope. Behind that, the river that the slope keeps out of our house.  This is my favorite light – when, at nearly dusk, the light from the sunset follows the course of the river, like a huge counter movement of buttery- warm light making a tunnel of brilliance through the twilight.

The horses presently have no routine at all, as I may have already explained, what with riding and the heat of the barn in the middle of the day and the differing calorie requirements of my menagerie.  Sometimes I don’t let them out till after one in the afternoon, by which time they are uber cranky.  Today, I got there at about ten fifteen.  It’s a cloudy day (of COURSE it is – the hay is down, waiting for baling – which just happens to be happening as we speak) and in the seventies.  A GREAT day for a ride, if you’re not wearing a compression stocking and under orders to be good.

So anyway, on this kinda breezy, cool day – especially after all this dry heat – the horses get wound up.  As I walked up the driveway, they crowd the gate, nipping at each other and generally looking like fresh fish in a bucket.  The colt’s favorite trick is banging on the gate with a front hoof.   So I get up there, and my magnificent Dustin’s head is way up – he looks like a painting of a horse, like a poem or a statue – so beautiful.  He doesn’t let me reach up and touch his nose.  So I’m resting my arm on the gate as I work at the chain snap – and danged if he doesn’t nip ME.  Right in the tender part under the bottom between the wrist and elbow (that probably has a more concise name).  Second time in all of seven years.

It didn’t do damage, but it stung.  What possessed him to do that?  Impatience?  Maybe.  Because the moment that gate came open, Sophie went shooting out like she had fire under her tail, and Z was hot on her heels.  How they make the turn through the little pasture gate at that speed, I do not know.

But when they went pounding into the pasture, suddenly, this little white shape went flying straight up out of the grass.  I wasn’t even sure I’d seen it, it was so fast.  Maybe a plastic bag, blowing in the breeze?  But no.  There it was again – a compact, streaking ball of white leaping out of the grass, just ahead of the hooves.  Findis, the cat.  Next time I let them out, I better warn her first.

G in his biking clothes.  He went twenty two miles this morning before breakfast, from lake all the way up into the canyon.  Woo-Hoooo!

My kitchen on a stormy afternoon.

The same stormy day, weird light SOOC (straight out of the camera).  That day, it felt like we were living inside an aquarium.

A visual guide to flood irrigation:  G is standing at our headgate.  On it, more like.  Lifting the metal that blocks Stan’s ditch to let the water go through.  Sounds easy, doesn’t it?  “Lifting.”  More like “wresting.”

We go up to the gate at the river, close off the return gate and open the downstream gate.  It takes between forty minutes and an hour for the water to get down to our gate.  You would not want to be in that conduit when the water hits.  If you stand downstream, watching and listening at a dry gate for the water to come—it’s like the end of the world for everything down there: first a tremor (think Jurassic Park), then the rumbling sound, then this tremendous whoosh of the air, being pushed ahead, and suddenly, the slamming surge of wild water, washing away everything in that world below.

When it hits our downstream gate, now closed, it throws itself into our little cement box, crashing sideways, then roiling and complaining until it finds our open gate.

You wouldn’t want to fall in here (or drop your cel phone into it).  Sometimes we get surprises, driven and delivered by the busy water.  This year, it was a dead raccoon. Oh, joy.  You can see how the water slaps against the bulwork – look closely – it covers the arch and would go over the top if it could.  And fills the ditch on the other side.

Now, we have our own happy little stream, parting the grasses and finding its way, finally over the south bank to fill our pasture as though it were a huge, shallow saucer.  I have built dikes over the years to keep the inquisitive water out of the barn, where it has no business being.  It covers the grass, anywhere from two to five inches deep.  If you like, you can come down some afternoon when this is happening, and run through the grass barefoot.  The dead raccoons usually get stuck down there in the ditch, so you don’t have to worry about that.

Three or four hours of drama, every ten days.  But it all finally soaks down into the soil to find the roots of our grass, and life goes on.

Rachel and Chaz and Misty and I went to Gardener’s Historical Village on a girls’ day out a couple of weeks ago.  It’s a fun place, like a little village, laid out in the most charming prospect ever.  Each store is in a tiny historic building, all hauled in by somebody with delightful vision, each with its history engraved on a plaque by the front door.  Hand made things, odd delights, wonderful treasures.

I came out of a store to find the other three staring at this house, pointing to the eves and making female noises of cuteness and wonder.  I couldn’t see a thing up there, but they told me: a mother bird, feeding her babies, way up under the eves.  So I took a picture.  What you see here has already been doctored.  In the original shot, you saw what I saw, nothing but black up there under those eves.  But when I got the shot home and explored – oh, here is the wonder of light – this:

is what I found.  This little bird, tucked way into the shadows, feeding her babies.  How cool is photography?

This is what you get when your horse takes the barrels in your arena seriously.  For those who don’t know about western riding (i don’t know that much): western riders love to do these races, like pole bending (if you know dog agility, it’s just like that, only bigger), and barrel racing.  The latter, as pretty clearly explained in the name, is a matter of racing from barrel to barrel, making tight turns (have you ever seen a horse turning so fast he’s actually lying down?) and heading for the next one.

I do not barrel race. But evidently, Zion, at some point in his checkered past, has done it – and so thinks, when we are happily, casually using MY barrels as just interesting landmarks in the arena, that I want to go around them just about as tightly as he can, with very little concern for the fact that I actually have a LEG hanging down there that might just get in the way.  Two things cannot fill the same space at the same time, unless one of them sort of dissolves so the other can pass right through.

Which is evidently what happened to my knee.  This is about a week later.  I wanted the spectacular color recorded, but kept forgetting to have it shot.  But you get the idea.

Julie, the only dog EVER to be allowed to sleep on a bed in this house. Doesn’t she make an adorable little package?  She’s lying on Levi’s purloined blanket: he is her purpose in life, so we comforted her with his smell.

Among her other charms, Chaz suffers from an inordinate fondness for beetles.  This guy was on our front porch one morning, and she went nuts over him.  Evidently, and quite happily, we don’t see a whole lot of these guys around here.  He stuck around for days.  Then suddenly, there were about three of them: a tour of scarabs that got blown off course on their way to Egypt?  Now they’re gone.  Go figure.

This mysterious tree started growing in our yard years ago.  I tried matching it to some leaf template in our Western Trees book, but could never be sure.  This year, I went out to see if the birds had gotten every darn one of the twenty three cherries our tree faithfully puts out every year (like clockwork), and found these branches all tangled with the cherry ones:

Okay.  So you know what this was?  Neither did I.  It looked like a raspberry/blackberry tree.  But I was SURE it had to be poisonous.  I went back to the books and finally found out: this is a MULBERRY TREE.  Just like in the song, except not a bush.  And this fruit?  IT’S YUMMY!!!!  Only because of all the stuff going on, I didn’t get to the lower fruit before  the birds got it.  So now, I could make a pie, if I had a really, really, REALLY tall ladder.  Who woulda thought?  Fabulous berries that grow five stories in the air?

So there.  I think I’ve finished up  all the little loose ends, except the recipes I found last November.  How sad.  I guess I’ll just have to root out more stuff.  Tough job, that.