Spring Blossoms...

 

This Serviceberry or Sarvis , which is our first  tree to bloom in the spring, is now covered in rounded clouds of white blossoms.  This little beauty is one of my most photographed trees from my daily walks over the hillside trails.  

        

The past few sunny days have seen me out in my gardens and beds cleaning up. The weeds, Henbit, Dead Nettle, and others, are growing faster than I can chop and pull. 

I still do a lot of gardening but not like I once did.  I don't have many pictures of my older gardens, but someone once took this picture of my oldest granddaughter and  me in one of those gardens, and I took the one of our grandson in the same garden several years later.   I really had the fever then for digging and planting and everything gardening, not too unlike Elizabeth Von Armin did in her book,  Elizabeth and Her German Garden.  

 Of course, having become a Countess when she married a German aristocrat,  her gardens were a far cry from those of a primitive nature like mine, but, nonetheless the passion she had was the same as mine.  For that reason, I find her book quite enjoyable.  

In one particular instance, when she was frustrated with her gardener, she wrote, "If I could only dig and plant myself!  How much easier, besides being so fascinating, to make your own holes exactly where you want them and put in your plants exactly as you choose..."   

Isn't that amusing?  I thought all women dug their own holes.  I am quite sure my darling hubby could never get a hole exactly where it should be.  (However, I must admit that there have been some really big holes dug here in hard clay soil in which he had to lend me a hand.)  

    

Elizabeth also expressed the desire to have someone with whom she could "hold communion" with on the subject of gardening, or "indeed on any matter.  My only way of learning is by making mistakes,"   she wrote.

"...and I long more and more for a kindred spirit ~ it seems so greedy to have so much loveliness to oneself~ but kindred spirits are so very, very rare; I might almost as well cry for the moon."  How well I can relate to her thoughts here.  

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I finally finished up all the legs/feet/shoes for the five dolls.  The painting mess is all cleaned up now and put away, thankfully, for my sink in the laundry room is going to be needed for cleaning up and filling hummingbird feeders.  According to the migration chart they should be here any day, so I am watching closely for my first sighting.  

 

Spring Peepers...

If you should care to, listen here to the songs of spring peepers. They have given me such a bad case of spring fever, like nothing else can do. From here on the porch last evening, Millie and I  listened  while the sun was setting in all of its magnificence. 

It always takes me a week or more to adjust to the new "fast time" as we call it, but we don't really change things up much from season to season or year to year.  I am reminded of one of my favorite passages from Vincent Van Gogh.

I must continue to follow the path I take now.  If I do nothing, if I study nothing. If I cease searching, then, woe is me.  I am lost.  That is how I look at it --keep going.  Keep going come what may, but what is your final goal, you may ask.  That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draft turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elabortion of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

  It seems many of you are already doing some spring house cleaning.  I will have to get around to that eventually, probably when we shut down the wood-burning stove, but for now my heart is in the great outdoors, or at the sewing machine sewing on ruffles and lace for the dolls.  I just love this video of Bernadette Banner trying out her new old sewing machine.  

A blogging friend sent me some wonderful vintage pieces from old clothing, which are just the dearest things.  Our little Linnie seems to have claimed these old pieces for her very own, which I think will be so fine for her.  You will notice that she is now wearing the bonnet, which seems always to be causing a great stir among the dolls.  They all insist that they want bonnets of their own.  This thing may go on and on into next winter when the snow flies once again... 

Until next time,

 Mary

March...

 

It seemed today that if Millie and I should keep going, we might walk right into a great yellow ball.  It was a blinding thing, for sure, from which  I had to shade my eyes with my free hand.  However, as it continues its northward trek, this bright sun will soon be setting behind the thick woods that border the upper meadow so that Millie and I will be walking in a dappled shade which is quite wonderful on a hot summer's day.    

   

 A couple of days ago, something was definitely going on at the pond for there were two Great Blue Herons instead of the customary one.  They are solitary critters and it is rare that we ever see two together, unless...  Well, it is almost spring you know, so...

  

 

There were more new calves born on the farm today, and Rosa's new baby was one of them.  She's a spry little thing and is so fortunate to have such a good mother.  

The yellow jonquils are blooming now, here and there, and almost everywhere, it seems.  In the woods, I spotted a White Dog-Tooth Violet or White Trout Lily as it is sometimes called.  It's a rare but pretty little thing that's easy to miss if one's not careful.  

Now back inside,  work has begun on dressing the dolls.  You just won't believe the good fortune that the dolls have had, but I will save that story for another day.

I finally finished reading Grace Snyder's No Time On My Hands. (It's a long read, but a good one!)  Most of my quilting friends are probably already familiar with this amazing woman and her famous quilts, one of which is the Flower Basket Petit Point Quilt pieced with 87,875 tiny triangles, no bigger than a fingernail, and five miles of thread.  Pictured below is one block from this astounding quilt.  

Grace wrote, "I grew up on the high plains of Custer County, Nebraska, where, as a child of seven and up, I wished three wishes and dreamed three dreams.  I wished that I might grow up to make the most beautiful quilts in the world, to marry a cowboy, and to look down on the top of a cloud.  At the time I dreamed those dreams and wished those wishes, it seemed impossible that any of them could ever come true."  

But they all did come true!   Below is Grace with her cowboy on the day of their wedding. There's one thing for sure, this pioneer woman definitely had "No Time On Her Hands."   ( I love them and their story.  And, I love this picture.  Isn't Grace just beautiful and Bert so handsome?)