Home, Home On The Range

My mother and father rolled into town last weekend and "sat a spell."  It was good to see them.  At one point last Saturday afternoon, while I was washing up after the market, Mom said, "I'm going to tell people that if they want to visit North Carolina, May is the month to do it."  The weather has been perfect this spring.  While we've a had a couple of scares with the heat, but the spring has been long, we've had a good amount of rain, and its been really comfortable.

Do, do, do, lookin' out my back door.

Our neighbors winter wheat is starting to turn colors in our front yard and against these beautiful blue skies, the view from the garden is just terrific.  Dad said that the east coast is so different from where they live on the west coast.  Out there, you get really big skies with long horizons, but on the east coast, we essentially live in a forest.  The tree line cuts off the horizon and a long view is rare.  That's one of the reasons I love our place here in Hurdle Mills.  We have a couple of spots where you would think you were in Kansas or California for the views.

I walked that path a hundred ninety,
Long, low time ago, people talk to me

Evelyn has been working really hard on the herb and butterfly garden.  This has been an especially important project that neither of us get enough time for.  This is the side yard that faces the street and there was 200 square feet of despotic ugly attached to the house when we first moved in, that we've since removed.  Underneath the ugly was an old well that was capped and covered with rock and concrete.  Since the demo ("liberation",) we have been using those slabs of concrete and flat rocks to build the path as well as littering the rest of the garden with large rocks and a big hunk of concrete that Evelyn dug out of the dirt.  Evelyn didn't want you to see it but behind those bushes to the left is the remaining pile of rubble.  Anyway, I have gone to calling this the "Ruins Garden" or "Garden of Ruin".  If you have a better name for it, please, leave it in the comments.  Of course, we'll clean it up a bit but it ain't a great priority right now.  Nevertheless, this garden is looking beautiful and totally fits our "shabby chic" way of life.