We're not having too much of a leisure weekend, even if it is a pleasant one. Too much work needing to be done, and that's a constant with the care of a  house and garden, and above all, two puppies. It's all orderly and all of it is entirely voluntary to satisfy our need for taking care of the things that matter in our lives.  Summertime chores seem to revolve around the garden. And Irving has taken on another challenge entirely unneeded by those meant to benefit. Wrestling a 50-lb. bag of peanuts every time one becomes exhausted is hard work, from truck to house.

 

But the rewards are there, our very own special entertainment in seeing the wildlife gather around Last night around one a.m. our winter-frequent visitor who sometimes comes around carelessly during full daylight hours but hasn't been around the past month or so, deigned to visit. We've become more accustomed of late to seeing a much larger mother raccoon come around at night with her five kits, and watching them is quite the experience.

 

The Lone Ranger, aka masked marauder come around, splayed himself full out flat on the porch, half under the bench, and kept reaching out to scoop up peanuts. When Jackie and Jillie barked their welcome (or was it annoyance?) the little fellow didn't even raise his head. Later, when we were in bed after he'd left the porch, Jackie and Jillie leaped downstairs barking and we assumed it was the mother with her kits following suit.

 

This morning Irving went out to wash and scrub the wrought iron bench and armchair on the porch, and two wrought iron tables, preparatory to painting them with a spray bomb. It's time, they're all getting a little shabby looking. The bench is now 50 years old, we bought it two house back in time, and the others not quite as old, badly needed painting.

 

In the mid-afternoon we accompanied Jackie and Jillie to the ravine for their afternoon turn-about through the forest trails, on a 26C, sunny, light-breeze day with no rain in the forecast, for a change. The cool confines of the forest interior beyond pleasant. We noticed during our hike through the trails yesterday that colourful mushrooms are beginning to pop out of the forest floor.

We did come across one other person on the main trail walking a part beagle, part Walker hound puppy whom we came across on an earlier occasion. Puppies are so energetically blissful about life and fall all over themselves in excitement over the prospect of meeting someone new, who can pet and admire them.This little fellow had mastered the art of ingratiation amazingly well.

 

The thimbleberry shrubs in the ravine have been in flower for the past month, and they continue to bloom, their bright pink flowers popping into notice wherever we look. Earlier blooms have already begun to form berries and it won't be long before they're ripe, edible, moist and sweet. They'll ripen in succession over time, calling out for plucking and enjoying.

 

As we doubled our way back on our circuit that takes us from trails rounding the creek at the bottom of the ravine, up onto higher ground on the spine of the ravine with many trails leading off on either side of the ridge, we eventually end up down back at the creek albeit not where we originally crossed it; a succession of bridges fording the creek as it winds it way through the forest, crossed on the circuit. At the last of the bridges we cross before making our way up  the steep  hill to the top of the forest and street level, there was a tall plant among the colony of jewelweed growing at the edge of the creek not yet in flower.

 

But the tall plant was, and at a distance we could see from the foliage, the height of the flower on the plant and its colour that it was the first of the Himalayan orchids (balsam family) to come into bloom this summer. Usually they're much later blooming, but this year everything has been hastened as a result of unusual weather conditions, and the Himalayan orchids, an invasive species, have proliferated wildly, just as the black-eyed Susans have, covering the hillsides closest to the street we live on.