Make that arbor weekend

Two (more) new trees in the ground make a total of seven now in our back yard. It is beginning to feel like the oasis we had in mind three years ago as we stood looking at a yard of grass, grass, and more grass. I don't find grass overly appealing. When it's soft it's nice to lay in or walk across barefoot, but to keep it soft all summer long requires copious amounts of water and fertilizer, which in turn also calls for continuous mowing. Everything about lawn grass seems rough on the environment.

We didn't actually take out a lot of grass today, but I got to spend a lot of time looking at the gardens we have put in, and remembering the yard as it was three years ago before all the back breaking labor of sod removal. I can imagine, when our house was built four years before that, the workers unrolling sod blanket after sod blanket to carpet the entire relatively large lot, but I doubt they imagined how much work we would eventually go to in order to undo theirs. I need to mention that we've had lots of help along the way, mostly from our parents. Today, for the task of putting a ten foot tree with a 24 gallon root ball into the ground, we have Jon's dad to thank. And Calvin, who had a wonderful time getting muddy, muddy, muddy.

So that was our weekend, spent mostly in the yard and gardens, mowing, edging, weeding, and planting two trees (not to mention settling Calvin's seedling into a pot so it can get a little more size before we put it in our ground), and finishing just in time to enjoy the sun that finally came out in the last few hours of Sunday.

These last two photos are courtesy of Calvin cam.

Arbor Day

We have a new seedling today, for which I have J. Sterling Morton to thank. While Earth Day seems all the rage right now (making it more or less unforgiveable that we failed to observe it officially in our house this year), Arbor Day seems to get far less attention. Earth Day, in fact, is the newer of the two holidays, having started in the 1970s. Arbor Day began in Nebraska nearly 100 years earlier, in 1872. Maybe Earth Day is more popular than Arbor Day the way that any teeny bopper star will outweigh a centenarian in general popularity. But I love trees, and while I try to be kind to Earth every day, I plant trees far less often, and that makes Arbor Day feel like a more special pseudo-holiday for me.

As an aside, the first person who points out the seeming incongruity in my tree and book collecting hobbies gets a cookie. An organic cookie. And you can check out this video if you want, just for fun.

We celebrated Arbor Day by picking up our free douglas fir seedling from the Village of Dexter, where Calvin also helped decorate the new community bird house, and then we went to our local nursery. we are quite fond of trees, and having moved into one of those house-farm subdivisions, the kind with just one tree per yard (planted carefully in the front), we have spent the last three years improving our lot in life. Since moving in we have planted at least one tree per year, usually in the fall, but this year we are adding a river birch, which transplants best in the spring, so Calvin and I brought home a new river birch, Betula nigra, to continue our process of treeing the back yard. We are smitten with both of our new additions.

We also spent some time really looking at and sketching trees, which, contrary to preschool belief, are not green circles perched atop brown sticks. Imagine.

It started with a childhood collection

I don't have a lot to say today. In part that's because we didn't do much today and generally my blog fodder comes from our daily activities. Today we got up and headed straight to the library to shelve books in the sale room before story time. Last weekend Jon introduced Calvin to his childhood collection of Nate the Great books and yesterday Calvin fell in love with them. We'd read a couple of books from the series with him before but the difference now is that he can read them to himself. That's empowering. So at the library this morning, regardless of the stack of them at home, Calvin asked to check out more of the series. We checked out five, and he read those, and some of his dad's copies, from 10am, while I shelved books, until 4pm, when I requested his help with dinner, laundry, and piano practice (with breaks only for story time and, of course, the bathroom). He's like a man with a mission—an obsession.

So we read books all day, not even together, and that doesn't make for a lot of blog fodder. A couple of times I asked Calvin to play a game with me but he politely declined, without even looking up from his book. I had lots of ideas for us today—ideas that included crayons, markers, Legos, you name it—but I'm learning to go with the flow. There will be other days for crayons, for games, for outdoor fun (and today, at fifty and rainy, definitely didn't qualify for that anyhow), and today there isn't much to talk about because we spent it inside, immersed in books and in our own thoughts. Still, that's a good day.

River deltas

When we went out to check on our rain gauge yesterday we found no rain in it. None!

That's a mistake not likely to happen again for about a week. We got so much rain today that when we went to check it this afternoon, taking advantage of sunshine that decided to come late for today's party, not until about five, I couldn't take a picture because I was too busy holding my pants up to keep them out of the water oozing around my feet in our lawn. I shudder to think (remember) what it was like before we did all that work in the backyard and rerouted the drainage. Calvin tells me it might have been like a big river delta and I think he might actually be a bit disappointed by our new and improved drainage.

Jon's dad tells me that this spring has been significantly wetter than usual, and our neighbor, the one with the white fence that works so well in so many of our garden pictures, tells me that it is supposed to remain cooler and wetter than usual right up through June. To me this is the slayer of hope. Every week I click that 10-day outlook button on the weather page hoping to see at least some numbers in the 70s in the near future. Now I guess I can stop clicking, then if we do get some decent weather it will be like a fantastic surprise.

Today we woke up to skies so dismal that we had to turn lights on in the house. We read books to each other and played a newish (to us) game called Where in the World, but artificial light in the morning is depressing, so we packed up and headed out to run our weekly errands. A pharmacy and two grocery stores later we had a week's worth of food and supplies and the rain had just stopped and no lights were needed in the house. We scanned and stored our purchases, practiced piano, played with Legos, Playmobil, and dinosaurs, and marked Calvin's favorite volcanoes on a world map (yes, I said favorite volcanoes). I ran, Calvin read Nate the Great in a weak afternoon light. Then two hours later the sun actually came out and we braved the squishy yard (the one Calvin thinks might have been like a river delta had we not broken our backs in hours of labor last summer) to read the rain gauge.

Volcanoes over roses

Our weekend was a bright, a truly bright, moment in an otherwise dull month. But rainy days have their own moments of splendor. Every time we drive into the city we go by these beautiful farm fields that, in the spring, are a bright emerald green, and they are never so bright as on a dismally rainy day. They make me think of Ireland, and long to visit distant shores. We actually stopped today and rolled down the window to grab a couple of shots and to breath in the sweet spring air.

I guess that is a little like stopping to smell the roses, but to me the fresh smell of the dawning of a new season is ever so much more enjoyable than an over-perfumed rose. There are a great many things deemed beautiful by the world at large—things that we are told we must experience by people who must know—but things overlooked far outnumber those that are worshipped, and who is to say what you or I will find the most beautiful. Certainly not those people who are in the know.

I mention to Calvin, while on our way home after the quick photo stop, that those fields are what I imagine Ireland might look a little like. Oh, he says, and I can tell that his mind is somewhere other than on Eire. I am right. His mind is on Iceland, and has been for a few days now. He wants to know more about volcanoes. When he started reading that dinosaur story last week I prepared books for the questions I was sure to be coming—questions about dinosaurs, of course. But Calvin is not overly interested in dinosaurs at this moment, it's volcanoes and tectonic plates that fill his mind day and night. And while it is widely assumed that children, especially boys, will succumb to a love affair with dinosaurs at an early age, volcanoes live in the shadow of their cretaceous co-habitants, at least as far as information for kids goes. But the information is out there if you leave the world of pop-culture and explore a little. We watched the National Geographic video on volcanoes for a third time tonight (thank you Netflix streaming), we have a handful of books from the library, and I've got some Bill Nye queued up on You-Tube for tomorrow.

Dinosaurs, like roses, are not favorites for all of us. We'll get to dinosaurs eventually, at least to some extent, and when we do Calvin will apparently already know all about volcanoes. I think if I offered the child a choice between a trip to Disney World and a trip to Iceland that he would joyfully pick the latter. I am good with that. Disney World is too crowded anyhow.

As you can tell, my injured hand has much improved, plus I have nearly mastered the art of typing with only two fingers on the right hand. I suspect that I will have to re-learn proper typing technique in a couple of weeks here.