~from the other side of the mountain~

Hello to you all, my dear friends and family out there and as Charlotte the spider would have said from E.B. White's Charlotte's Web, "Salutations!"  It's the early morning here along the Western Slopes and the outdoor temperature gauge is sitting at 45 degrees.  No wonder if feels kind of chilly as I crawled out of bed a few moments ago.  Our high for today is supposed to be close to 90 and the week that is upcoming looks like a good one, weather wise.  Soon enough the monsoon rain season will begin and we will have to be most careful as we venture out onto places that are not covered with rock.  For a while, even the clothesline will be impossible to use unless you don't mind sinking to your knees in wet clay-filled soil and thus never finding the shoes you might have been wearing ever again.  This soil and I do battle on a regular basis and in the end, it most always wins. 

Despite the not so good soil around here, things continue to grow.  I lost all of my zinnias and sunflowers, giving up the idea for this season that I should even attempt them.  However other things are surviving, even in our outdoor growing areas.  Perhaps the biggest surprise was the small bed of potatoes that I planted right outside of our bedroom window.  They were brought back from Kansas when I made the trip during spring break and because the weather turned even more unpredictable than normal, they weren't able to be planted in a timely fashion.  I didn't want them to be a total waste so even in their very withered condition, I cut them up and laid them into the soil one Saturday in mid-April.  75% of the tomato and pepper plants succumbed to the freakish early  May freeze/snowstorm/hailstorm that no one expected but the few that made it continue on.  The green beans and corn are up and actually look pretty good.  They will be surrounded by mounds of cucumbers, muskmelon, cucumbers and gourds if all goes well.  It is difficult to be a gardener here, at least for me, but I had determined that this summer I would give it a try and so I shall.

Yesterday we "caught" a little visitor that had been wreaking havoc on our plants on the front deck. For about a year now, a little squirrel had been living in that area underneath our house.  We would see him scurrying back and forth and from time to time would hear him as he squealed.  Lately we had been noticing that he had been helping himself to late night snacks of sweet potato vines from our big planters as well as pretty much mowing off our crop of basil.  Over the weekend Mike bought a trap to catch him in and after a couple of nights of trying, he finally took the wonderfully delicious bait of peanut butter and apples.  Yesterday afternoon I saw him in the trap and was thankful that we had finally cornered him because I love the beautiful plants that he had been so interested in chowing down on.  He was a strange looking squirrel, certainly NOT like the ones back in Kansas.  To me, he almost seemed like the little creature in the Ice Age movies, the one who is always trying to save the one last acorn on earth and never quite does.  Our friend Ed came over with his little grandsons and they took the trap safely away from our house and released the culprit  back into the wild about 6 miles from here.  Hopefully that was far enough away so he won't find his way back to the Renfro front porch.  Time will tell. 

Back across the big mountain, to the east about 611 miles, the good folks in my home state of Kansas are gearing up statewide to get their crops of Hard Red Winter wheat harvested.  The wheat harvest was always my favorite time of the year as a kid growing up and I never really lost that "love" as I grew older.  I will miss it.  Last year I went back home to get a few things in mid-June that we didn't have room for in the car as I moved out here to Colorado.  While I was there I got to spend an afternoon in a combine as my sister-in-law Nancy cut the wheat on their farm in Sedgwick County.  It was fun and something I hadn't done in a whole lot of years.  As I sat there beside her while she made the circles around the field, I couldn't help but to remember times so very long ago when I sat with my own father inside the cab of one of his Massey Ferguson combines and watched him mow down the golden wheat.  Many good memories that I have made over the years involve being a good steward of the land, something my father and mother taught me and surely something that I tried to pass on to my own children as well. 

The dawn's first light is breaking across the eastern horizon and out the window the silhouettes of the Black Canyon and old Silverjack Mountain are beginning to show.  It's the announcement that our day shall soon begin here and it's time to get a "move on" before we end up trading too much of that approaching daylight for dark.  My prayer for you all this day would be that everything would be well for you, for ALL of us.  May peace be your journey as you travel through the time allotted for this day.  I am always thinking of you, each of you.  All of you.  In my heart you are not even that many miles away any longer and that is a very nice feeling to have.  This is the 10th day of June, 2014.  What shall we make of it? 

We paused on this past Sunday afternoon to take a break from our busy life right now to enjoy the beauty of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.  Such a breathtaking sight that is literally right in our own backyard.  God's creations never cease to amaze me.