After the rain

 It’s a beautiful morning to drink my coffee under the canopy of the old maple tree. After all the rain we’ve had it’s more humid but there’s a nice cool breeze in the shade. Brian is out playing 18 holes of golf with his friend Mark. I don’t have any plans for the remainder of the day; I’m still recuperating but I am doing better. 

The cicadas are buzzing and the cardinals, Bette and Verne, have been singing. Hummingbirds are enjoying all our nectar rich flowers: the black and blue salvia, firecracker plant, zinnias, lantana, lythrum, and purple coneflowers. Goldfinches are devouring the seeds of the Joe Pye weed, zinnias and black-eyed Susans. The robins are bob…bob…bobbing along. Bees, butterflies and other pollinators are all over the flowers. Our dwarf sunflower seeds🌻 and dogwood tree berries will soon be a source of food. The only additional food we feed the birds are suet cakes and we enjoy seeing a lot of different varieties of birds. Our male cardinal, Verne, mastered the art of hanging on the suet last year. His mate, Bette, patiently waits on the ground for a morsel to fall. None of the suet ever goes to waste! 

In the distance I hear the raucous cawing of a crow. Most mornings I hear him and it makes me smile. It brings back fond memories of a lovely vacation Brian and I took in Bayfield, Wisconsin several years ago. The rustic cabin we stayed in had a huge screened-in porch that was surrounded by woods. Every morning, as I enjoyed my coffee out there, a crow would greet me with his cawing. Just lovely!