Where's Autumn?

For the last week it has been hot and a little humid; today's high, before a "cold" front came through, was 90 degrees. Not unheard of in October, but most of the garden looks tired and ready for fall's cooler respite. Not so these glorious marigolds, which put out lush foliage all summer (we probably gave them too much fertilizer) but started to bloom only after the autumnal equinox. (A click should enlarge the image.) They are special flowers, a present to Norm from Doug. They arrived in a seed packet that was enclosed with a CD by Janet Paschal that Doug gave Norm earlier in the year. Norm planted the seeds in several planters and pots and now we have glorious gold and yellow marigolds to imitate the non-existent fall leaf colors. Thanks, D!

After 6 years here, it was time to do a little touching up of paint on the porch and the doors. Most of the house is brick, with weatherproof cladding around soffits, windows and the like. But a little trim remains, and it is starting to show checks and cracks. For the last couple of weeks, Norm has been scraping and cleaning and now painting.



Even though there was a 30 percent chance of rain this afternoon, he worked on the front porch. Sure enough, just enough drops fell to make the pavement damp. Less than a trace, officially. And no rain, but cooler days and nights, for the next week, so he can get a lot of painting done!

We Have a Winner!

Back in February, I attended a weekend retreat of my quilt guild and made a table runner under the direction of our guest teacher, who also picked out the harmonious fabrics for it. Over the spring and summer, I hand-quilted it and finished it with a scalloped edge as the instructions called for, although the curved edge was a little tricky to do. It was my only finished entry for the biennial Flower Valley Quilt Show, which was held this weekend. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the show this afternoon and my friends in quilting greeted me with smiles and said, "go look at your quilt!"

As a result of the Viewer's Choice voting on Saturday, my little table runner (at lower right in this photo, with some of the competition) received the third place yellow ribbon. I was (and am) so pleased and a little humbled because the winners in all of the categories are some of the experts in our guild, whose work I have admired since I joined in 1990. To receive any prize at all is something I have never even imagined I would do.


On Saturday many friends outside of quilting visited the show, including my aerobics instructor and friends from the water exercise class. And I got another surprise when our friends Karen and Gary from Edwardsville called on a cell phone to get directions to the show. (I think they might have voted for my entry. Thanks, guys!) The quilt in the background here also got Karen's vote for full size quilts, although it didn't win a ribbon. There were over 100 quilts in that category and more than 300 quilts in the entire show. It was a full and fun weekend.

A Trip to Cotton Country

Our latest adventure was a trip to Sikeston, Mo., in the delta country. The area is known for its cotton and rice crops, and for a restaurant whose signs decorate Interstate Highways from Colorado to Texas and beyond.


We and our friend Mike took a drive in Gracie and arrived at Lambert's Cafe (a misnomer, since it's more like a cavern or a warehouse in size) in time for supper. The decor is early American license plate, hardwood benches, and all the "throwed" rolls you can catch. I'm smiling because I actually caught two of them (and dropped none)!

We were actually on a mission to attend the area assembly of our church (hence, my T-Shirt in the photo above.) After a restful night at the local Super 8, we found the First Christian Church easily. It seemed to us, with the red brick and steeple, to have something in common architecturally with Compton Heights.
It was a glorious day--clear, cool and calm.

Contrary to rumor, this is not Norm's harem, but part of the Compton "crew" that attended the assembly, plus our former student associate pastor, who graduated from seminary last spring. Inside, the sanctuary reminded us of Compton, too, from the arrangement of the windows to the kind of wood and finish on the pews. It was a good meeting, and we saw a lot of old friends from many churches.

One unique feature we noted about Sikeston as we were driving around, trying to find the church, was a pair of cotton fields almost in the middle of town on South Main Street. The smoke in the distance in this picture is from agricultural burning, something that irritated a few sets of city lungs.

As I was taking this close-up of the cotton, I kept hearing an old melody from the Sixties run through my head:
When I was a little bitty baby, my mama would rock me in the cradle, in those old, cotton fields back home...Finally, decades later, I actually got to see a cotton field, up close and personal.

Linking

Just this week, with the help of a fellow blogger, I've figured out how to embed links in my posts, both to other web sites as well as internally to earlier posts on my own blogs. For a right-brained person, this tecchie achievement is heady, indeed. So when you are reading a post and come across some words that are a color (usually a pink but on one of the blogs it is a blue) instead of black, that's a link. Clicking on it might take you to a picture, or an earlier post, or someone else's blog or web page. As my friend said, blog on!

Hummingbird Frenzy Time

We have enjoyed ruby-throated hummingbirds at our feeders since April, and this month we are seeing some migrating birds beginning to vie with the natives for a turn at the sugar solution. This female at left seems at ease and indeed spends some time each day preening and guarding her squatting rights outside the dining room window.

Trying to sneak up on a hummer to take its picture from inside the house is harder than it sounds. As I sat in a chair right at the window, this visiting female stretched her neck and peered at me, ready to fly at a moment's notice. She was probably also watching for a diving run by another hummer, since they defend the feeding sites pretty viciously, resembling small fighter jets in a dogfight.

From the dark markings on its head, I think this one is an immature male, possibly one that was fledged around here in late July, when the adult birds were busy filling up on nectar almost constantly. He was also trying to stake out territory, but another bird chased him away.


A little bit later, this young male or another one managed to perch and drink for a long time. Soon all of the hummingbirds will be migrating south to Mexico and Central America for the winter. They react to day length, so the presence of our feeders won't keep them here until it is too cold for them. The average date for their return in this area is the last week of March. We'll be ready for them!

An informative site about the migration of hummingbirds is run by a local bird bander in nearby Fenton, Mo. Check out Hummingbirds.net at this link.

Introducing Gracie

Here's our newest set of wheels, a 2005 Dodge Grand Caravan that had about 21,5000 miles on it when we bought it on August 14 from Enterprise Leasing. After trying out various rentals this summer, we came back to a Chrysler Corp. minivan because it was the most comfortable and had the most room for the money. This one follows our two previous vans and keeps up our unbroken string of minivan ownership since 1986.

We took our new GC on its first road trip to Tulsa last month, and it performed extremely well. It has power features only dreamed of when we got our first Voyager: adjustable drivers' seat, rear vent openers, side door and liftgate power opener, etc. We can teach it to open our garage door, and it has a nifty "miles to empty" gauge that is extremely accurate! Both sets of rear seats fold down into the floor for cargo room. The middle seats are bucket style and comfortable. We feel fortunate to have 21st century wheels!

So, why and how did we name this van Gracie? Coming back from Tulsa, we tried all kinds of combinations. Since the car is silver, there were suggestions from friends such as Silver Fox, Hi Ho, etc. But then we realized that both of our burgundy vans had names unaffiliated with their color: Minnie and Vanna. So we asked, what can we do with Grand Caravan? We tried some "G" names: Gertrude, Griselda, etc. Then we tried "C" names: Charisse, Clarissa, etc. We tried wordplay: Caravanna. The we thought: GC. Gracie. And it stuck. So say hello to Gracie. We hope she'll be around, transporting us far and wide across the U.S. in comfort, for a long time to come!

A Turn of Season

One sure sign of September in these parts is the blooming of the wild star clematis vine that covers almost everything in sight. A few years ago we realized that the 'weed' sprouting out front on our slope was actually clematis, so we let it grow. It also drapes fences and bushes all through the village. Birds will eat the seeds in winter, and the frosty appearance of the blooms reminds us that snow might be only a few months away.



A summer bloomer that got a second wind around labor day is this plumbago, growing in a pot near the back porch. In August we thought it had finished its season, but it has surprised us with new buds and glorious, pure blue flowers. It's an annual, but we will look for more of this plant next year.



The lack of variety in this layout is due to my trying a shortcut and uploading all of my photos at once. Even though I specified "right, left, right" for the placement, I got this lineup. Lesson learned. But just before we took our quick trip to Tulsa, the goldfinch clan, which had been busy with nesting responsibilities, started bringing some of the new brood to the feeder outside our study window. On the left side, a youngster bends down to see if dad will get some thistle for him. Dad refused, and junior had to feed himself!

Tulsa Trip

The last week of August, we made an un- scheduled trip to Tulsa because of a death in the family. Debi's mom, Mary Jane, passed on to the next life after a difficult 15 years with Alzheimer's disease. Norm led a service of celebration for Mary Jane's life, but the Raburn family really supplied the content in memorable ways. Here Mike, Debi, Norm and I are savoring this chance to be together, even if it was a sad occasion.


The clan of Raburns were all present to remember their mother, grand- mother and great- grand- mother. After a dinner at Cari's house, everyone gathered on the patio for a group photo. My cousin Mike has a big family now! Debi has written about her mother's life and their family on her blog, Debide's View.

During our time in Tulsa, we visited the Gilcrease Museum, founded on the collection of an early oilman who also was a native American. His home (left) is on the museum grounds and serves as an education center. The museum features mostly Western and Native American art, although we also saw an exhibit of drawings by Andrew Wyeth while we were there.

A stroll through the grounds revealed several lovely theme gardens. In the colonial garden, purple phlox were blooming and this tiger swallow butterfly was enjoying the food supply.





In some galleries, taking photos is forbidden, but items in the museum collection can be photographed. This gallery looks out on the Osage Hills and features the bronze sculpture, "End of the Trail." (The bronze belongs to the museum. Norm is merely visiting!)

On Sunday, August 26, we attended the final service at Rogers Heights Christian Church, Judi's home church in Tulsa. After 62 years, the congregation had dwindled to the point it could no longer continue, so the remaining members decided to give the property to the Oklahoma Christian Foundation. Judi's parents were charter members of this church and Judi was 3 when they started attending. There are more photos and memories on Thursday's Child. Clicking on this link will take you there. I've figured out how to add permalinks to my posts! Hooray!

On this trip we also had somewhat subdued celebrations of our 39th wedding anniversary and Norm's 69th birthday. Time does march on, and things do change.

Summer Vacation Reprise: Flora and Fauna

In early June, we visited Garden City, Kansas, and spent a little time on the sand sage prairie looking for buffalo, which was a story in an earlier post. This photo above was in that post but I have repeated it here, to set the stage for the photos that follow. If you click in the image, it will enlarge and you'll see individual dots of orange in the foreground. This was a field of Gallardias in bloom.

Also called Indian Blanket, several species of gallardia bloom in the plains states. They are particular in that they like dry soil and sand or alkaline conditions. The ones in my native Oklahoma are a little taller than these. They wilt if you pick them and they die if you try to transplant them. The prairie is their home, and they fill it with blazing color for a couple of weeks every June.

Another signature plant of the prairie is the mallow, or Kansas Beauty as my mother-in-law always called them. They form a bright magenta carpet in early June, blooming when the gallardias do. We saw these near the spot where we began the ride on the buffalo preserve. These flowers were beloved by the pioneers and they spell "high plains" to me.

There is more sand sage prairie behind Don and Kay's house, and I climbed up their retaining wall to see what kinds of flowers were blooming on top, since it had been impossible to shoot photos of most flowers from the moving wagon on the buffalo expedition. I found many of these prickly pear cacti with golden blooms. In Oklahoma, prickly pears have a pink flower.

These looked like little sunflowers. I'm not sure of their exact species or name. But at this season, most of the plants in bloom had yellow or orange flowers, with white or shades of pink to purple being a distant second.





But the prairie was home to feathered friends as well as flowers. As I was preparing to climb up this garden wall to get the above flower photos, I looked up and saw a bird walking toward me...it is a western quail, larger and obviously more curious than our eastern bobwhites.

I just kept taking photos as the quail trotted closer and closer. It seemed almost curious to find out what kind of bird I was.

Finally the quail approached the end of the wall and just stopped and gave me another long look. Then I must have shifted position and it finally flew away.


And no, I wasn't making this up. Unbeknown to me, brother Don on his back porch was taking pictures of me taking pictures of the quail, and after the reunion, he e-mailed this one to me!

Summer Vacation Reprise: The Santa Fe Trail

Before summer ends, I want to share more images and stories of our Kansas trip in June. On the way to Garden City for the Linville reunion, we found ourselves retracing part of the Santa Fe Trail, and in this post I'll show and tell about some of the places we visited. At right is the flag in the center of the parade ground at Fort Larned, which is between Great Bend and Garden City. The fort was built around 1860 to safeguard traffic on the Santa Fe trail and give settlers and travelers some sense of security. It was said that travelers could see the flag on this pole miles away from the fort. We saw it too, from about 2 miles west on our way back east after the reunion.

We dropped in to the fort on a hot afternoon and quickly learned we would need more than an hour to see it all. There is a complete museum and gift shop and many of the buildings have been restored to their original state. This barracks held a regiment of enlisted men. They slept 4 to a bunk; two up, head to toe, and two down. Their uniforms, rifles and other gear hung in pegs on the walls. Furnishings were spare.

Fort Larned also had a well developed medical infirmary wing, with separate quarters for the doctor and corpsmen. The hospital beds were much roomier than the bunks. Each of the beds has a tag with the name of a soldier who was admitted, the date and the diagnosis. One of them suffered from "recurrent fever."

One of the buildings on the quadrangle housed a school that was attended by officers' children during the day and the soldiers at night. On the blackboard we saw this handwritten 8th grade final exam. It covered literature, geography, history, government, spelling, grammar, composition, arithmetic and algebra in 10 not-so-easy questions. If you click on the photo it will enlarge enough for you to read the questions. My favorite is No. 5: Tell what you can about the history of Kansas!


On this afternoon the post was serene. We looked in vain for evidence of where horses might have been kept. In addition to the barracks and the hospital shown here, there was a bakery, a blacksmith shop, laundry, a block house, quarters for officers and families, and various other functions. Somewhere on the wind we could imagine the clop of horse's hooves, the creak of wagon wheels, the sound of a bugle calling the troop to assemble.

Of course, we left Ft. Larned and arrived at Don and Kay's house on Thursday night to begin the reunion. Most of our activities there, including the electrical generating plant tour and the buffalo wagon tour, are covered in earlier posts. But we did all attend worship together at the Garden City Church of the Nazarene and I had to share a photo of this striking and beautiful stained glass window at the entrance to their sanctuary.







We also visited the Garden City zoo, a place dear to Kay and Don, who are strong supporters of it. This red panda was trying to take a nap in his tree as we rushed through near closing time on that Sunday. The zoo has unusual collections and is truly an oasis on the plains (not to mention on the Santa Fe trail.)


We were sorry to see our time in Garden City will all of the Linville sibs and inlaws come to an end, but we had more sights to see on the way back east. One stop was in Great Bend, where the historical society has placed 7 different Kansas themed quilt blocks in the sidewalks surrounding the historic courthouse square. This is the first one. I have pictures of all of them if anyone would like to see them!


We hoped to visit sites in Chase County that had intrigued us on our way west, but we were there on the wrong day for the Tallgrass Prairie and the historic Kaw Mission in Council Grove. We will be back some day. We did drive through the Tallgrass Prairie from Strong City to Council Grove and back to Emporia for the night. The cabin at above right was built by missionaries for Indians to learn how to adopt the white man's ways. A plaque on the grounds at Council Grove explained that the Indians disdained living in the cabins but kept their livestock inside.

We walked around the historic mission as the sun slanted low in the west. This is where the historic tour of Council Grove begins and we definitely hope to visit this segment of the Santa Fe trail on another trip, another year.

Since we were spending the night at Emporia, home of William Allen White, founder of the Emporia Gazette and an important figure in American journalism, I thought I'd like to visit his home, which is preserved as a museum. Not open on Tuesdays! From the outside, it is a fascinating structure. White was an early advocate of racial equality, and the town of Emporia was distinguished by its welcome of freed African Americans to settle after the Civil War. The quality of Emporia that impressed us most was the health of its Main Street and downtown business district. It was bustling, with shops and stores open and doing a brisk business. We drove downtown in search of a pair of replacement clip on sunglasses for Norm and found just what we needed at an old-fashioned drug store on the main street. Cash sales only!

Next installment: Prairie flora and fauna.

August: Hot and Dry

I guess the title of this post sounds like the weather forecast, but that's pretty much the outlook for the next 10 days in these parts. You wouldn't know it, though, from the show put on by the surprise lilies in the back yard border. They appeared almost overnight after we got home from our trip to Tulsa (see Thursday's Child) and have been in glorious bloom.

Meanwhile, our resident pairs of gold finches (two or three pair, we think) seem to be nesting and they are constantly at the thistle feeder. One of these days I'll get a camera with a longer zoom than 3x, maybe, so I can capture more detail before they nervously fly away.


In a season when even an early morning trip to the farm market for sweet corn, peaches and cucumbers leaves us hot and bothered and glad to be home in the air-conditioning, one of the amaryllis plants given to us by a friend years ago decided to bloom. This cream-colored wonder is a cooling sight on the front porch these days.

Also busy feeding a family were the hummingbirds during most of July. The female (here) and male took turns and kept us busy refilling the feeder with sugar water for at least two weeks. Usually we get hummers only during migratory season, but we got the feeders up early enough this year to attract a local couple. This feeder is attached to our dining room window with a suction cup, and we enjoy watching the tiny birds come and go while we eat our own meal.

There's a new look to our back yard: can you tell what is different? Actually several things are different, but the salient change for us is removal of the leaning, rusting chain link fence by our driveway. What little security it offered was outweighed by the unsightliness that seemed a barrier to the yard. We retained the fencing on the other side and at the back and will paint it with rust-resistant dark paint this fall or winter. The other change is in the left background: our northern neighbors demolished a rickety wood garage and a crew is building a sturdy new masonry two-car garage in its stead. It will be a nice backdrop to our flower border in coming years. Since this picture was taken, the roof trusses have been added and shingles should appear this week if all goes well. We are under an excessive heat warning, though, for the next 10 days. This photo was taken just after the July rains, and things are a little drier now.

Also thanks to cousin Debbie for this tip: you can click on some of the photos and they will open up larger on your screen. It works for me with the surprise lilies and the photo above, if you want to see more detail.