lupines

sunrise:  4:54

All of my photographic options dried up this morning, so I'll have to paint the day in words. 

The air was chilly and fresh outdoors.  A great, blue-gray, cloudless dome of sky displayed only the bright gibbous moon in the west.  There was a very light mist over the pond, where the bullfrogs burble and water bugs make various light speckles on the surface.  A pair of ducks flew overhead, in the midst of the usual avian symphony.  My walk now takes me through a lush green world - tall, thick grasses, flowering trees, expanding spans of fragrant phlox, leafy branches arching over my mowed pathway, daisies beginning to pop up all around, and in the field above the pond, our first lupines!

Very strange and exciting coincidence to see the lupines.  I have always loved them, but there were none on our property.  A couple of years ago we tried to get some to grow in the field above the pond by strewing seeds that we got from a bunch of dried up lupine pods that we found on the side of the road.  No sign of lupines last year, and I assumed that they didn't take.

At a farmer's market on Saturday we met a farmer who specializes in lupines.  He sells them every week, but he was sold out by the time N, T, and I arrived.  On the way back from driving N halfway to Connecticut yesterday (we met A halfway, and off they went to move in to a new apartment together - first time those two sisters will live together in five years) I stopped by the Snakeroot Farm in Pittsfield - the lupine farm.

I came home with three huge, healthy lupines in wild colors, ready to be planted in the upper pond field.  As I returned from my walk this morning, I passed the field and looked - and there are at least three lupines already there, looking very erect and healthy in the high grass.  Our seeds took, after all!

Not sure where I'll put the new ones now.  Nature is full of surprises.

As usual with a cloudless day, the sun rose in quiet subtlety over the brightening horizon.