Today it rained and rained and rained. The boys took umbrellas out to the bus stop this morning, folding them up before climbing onto the bus. The bus picks them up at 6:50 am and drops them off at school at 7:45 am. The ride home is shorter, only 30 minutes. The school is ten miles away in town.
This morning it was just barely light out when I woke them up for school. In another month we will be watching for the bus' yellow lights in pitch blackness. Tomorrow is Number Two Son's sixth birthday, and he asked if I could drive him and his brother to school. I'll probably do it. That reminds me, I still have to bake cookies for him to bring for his class tomorrow.
As I said before, today it rained. All day long. Today at work I found myself staring out the window for long minutes at a time, having lost track of whatever it was I was trying to accomplish. I can't concentrate. I stray from one task to another without finishing the first. Perhaps it's the change of seasons, a feeling that whether we are prepared for it or not, the warm green growing days of summer are over and the cool brown harvest days of fall are now here. Time to move from summer tasks to autumn tasks. Nevermind whether we have finished all of our summer tasks or not.
Late in the afternoon as I was driving out of the park, I looked out over one of our restoration fields. This field is in the process of being restored from brome grass meadow to tall grass prairie. It was planted with native seed last fall and we've been mowing it this summer to keep the weeds down. The short stubble of green and yellow grass was covered with a cottony gauze. I stopped the car and got out to take a closer look.
I thought maybe some trees or wildflowers had gone to seed and were spreading a cotton blanket across the prairie.
But as I looked closer I saw the blanket shining.
Closer still, the blanket broke apart into tiny silver pearls of rain clinging to strands of thin grass.
Even cloudy, rainy days are beautiful on the prairie.
6 comments:
Beautiful, beautiful pics of the rain drops on the prairie grass . . . especially the last one. Most people would have just zoomed by without stopping to notice or investigate. It always pays to "stop and smell the roses", doesn't it?
A lovely reminder to see the beauty in every day, my dear... I actually envy your rainy change of season a bit. We're going through a real "indian summer" here in Portland, with temperatures in the '90's. I'm more than ready for a little rainy dreary... the silver pearls will be a nice bonus to the comforting cloudcover!
gorgeous photo! And I remember those long school bus rides since I lived in the country too. Seems like it took 90 minutes to go the 15 minutes into town!
Mama Pea -- It does indeed!
Harold -- Are you saying that we, on the grasslands of western Minnesota, are getting more rain than you in the Pacific Northwest? How is that possible? I thought it rained there all the time!
Erin -- Yes, the bus rides are ridiculously long. And the bus is filled with kids from preschool thru 12th grade. My boys come home and ask me what words like 'sexy' and 'gay' mean. There are days that they learn more from riding the bus (and asking me about it afterwards) than from sitting in school.
I envy parents that are able to homeschool ...
Wow, the pics are lovely! :)
Amazing but true... we've had a surprisingly dry summer and early fall this year. No such thing as global climate change, right?
Your comment about explaining things to your boys after they ride the bus made me laugh.. back when I was their age, I lived in a little town called Chaparral, NM and was bussed to Anthony, NM for school. The ride was about 45 minutes, and I learned all kinds of stuff from the other kids too.
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