Early summer in Michigan

 Cynthia had several weeks of work in May and June, so rented a car and drove back, leaving the boat safe in a marina in New Bern (beside a wood-spar ketch owned by a fellow named Skip... how's THAT for coincidence?). Delightful neighbors: we shared stories and got lots of ideas for adventures and boat improvements.

Driving with two of us is always fast and easy and we arrived at the house in good shape... to find surprising destruction. Apparently a storm had passed through and done considerable damage to one of the big maples behind the house, sending several large branches into the earth like spears, but none hit the house.

Thank goodness we avoided anything like this we saw nearby:

Our neighbors kindly lent us a couple chainsaws and we rented a chipper and had a few days of fun work together. We delighted in the chipper, especially: it could chew up a branch twenty feet long in under a minute! We also took out some other dead and crowded trees while we had the chainsaws and chipper. Lucy went mad for one of the cedar trees, chewing on it and crying and barking, so we cut it down and  carpenter ants POURED out!

Done with that, she got excited about an old evergreen stump, so we pulled it out and let her dig madly at the hole...

and we then found that there was a big lump of pitch (sticky sap from the treee) in the soil, now well worked into her fur. Cynthia spent an hour or two clipping out the matted, sticky mess. Fortunately, Lucy needed a haircut and looked hardly the worse for the amateur emergency clip.

We mowed the path in the back meadow and added a couple more. The grass looked beautiful in the sunset light;

these brown and orange butterflies love the purple hairy vetch (there are three in the pic); 

Lucy would hunt through the grass flushing rabbits; and monarch butterflies danced around the milkweed, feeding on nectar and laying eggs; and the monarch larvae ballooned in size daily in a race to mature before predators removed them. 

We also found a few of these raspberry relatives near Lake Michigan and identified them as wineberries. Definitely edible.

Good memories.