My husband had meant to mow the front yard, which as I mentioned previously has become totally cloverized. Somehow he didn’t get around to it. Now we have a glorious flower-studded lawn, thousands of bright white flowers like stars in a sky of green. The bees are loving it. My husband and I have gone outside several times to watch them buzz around. There aren’t as many as we would have seen when we were kids, but there are more than we expected. I’ve asked my husband not to mow again until the flowers turn brown.
The air outside our house has been beautifully perfumed lately. At first I thought it was just the clover, but as the scent became more and more intense, I wondered it if included something else, perhaps wild roses. We don’t have any wild roses growing in our yard. However, in the woods behind the house, mostly hidden from us by various trees and shrubbery, there used to be a huge, vertical mass of them. While looking out the bathroom window the other day, I caught a glimpse of white, so I know it’s still there. The last time I saw it clearly, it was as tall as the house. I imagine it eventually growing to surround us, like the wall of roses around Sleeping Beauty, and that doesn’t seem like it would be entirely nice.
But I do love the wild roses, as invasive and prickly as they are. I try to get over to the library’s nature trails every year while the roses are in bloom. I went on Thursday. The roses had mostly gone by, so I didn’t get the “snow in June” effect, but they still smelled lovely.
While I was there, the temperature was in the high 80s. If the day hadn’t been a breezy one, I might have melted out there in the woods (June is the new July, it seems). But I survived. According to my pedometer, I walked 3,000 steps, or about 1.25 miles. I saw a bunny, a squirrel, wild roses, buttercups, wild irises, and some white flowers that I have yet to identify. There is a spot along the trail where there are three bars of varying heights for pull-ups, etc. Nobody else was around as I happened to be walking by the bars, so I stopped and tried a dead hang, which I’d read was good exercise. It didn’t feel good, though. My hands and shoulders were like “WTF!”
Farther down the trail, I spoke with an older couple who wandered by as I was taking pictures of those white mystery flowers. They wondered what it was I’d been photographing, so I told them, and the man and I chatted a bit about flowers. The man compared me to another walker passing by–a guy who was obviously a serious photographer, given that he had a real camera outfitted with a giant lens–calling him a “fellow bird-watcher, or whatever.” ;P