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| Zinnia - best planted by seed - lasts for one season. |
↑Tonight she dies.↑ Annuals, such as this pretty little Zinnia, bloom prolifically all summer long. But they don't last forever. The weather lady is predicting a hard freeze tonight.
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| Bearded Iris live forever - without any help from you. |
↑This gal↑ outlived my Grandmother, my Mother, and I'm pretty sure she'll still be dazzling passers by, with her beauty, long after I'm gone.
* You can often find Bearded Iris brightly blooming on abandoned homesteads.
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| This season's Greatest Hits. Many are golden oldies. The orange flowers have been blooming here for 20 years. That Peony up top? I think she's been around for 50 years. Since my Mother was a young lass. |
What's that you say? How could that be? How could I possibly be that old? Well. I'm like a Bearded Iris. I plan to live forever.
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| Day Lilies also last forever. Plant them in a sunny spot where they can help you out. They weed themselves! |
Okay… fine… it hasn’t been seven decades. Not nearly that many years. But it felt like 70.
I didn’t recognize a single person – which was a huge failure on my part. Because there were about 150 faces to choose from.
The other half of my graduating class did not attend. Perhaps they were trying to avoid the pressure.
It’s uncomfortable when people are screaming your name, hugging you, while you’re desperately trying to get a glimpse at their name tags. All claiming they missed you and me responding by saying: I missed you, too!!!
Because saying: Don’t touch me or who the hell are you? Well. That’s kinda rude.
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| Rocky Mountain Penstemon lives forever through plentiful re-seeding. Prefers the hottest, driest place you can find. |
Struggling with recognizing faces we haven't seen since we were 17 is not the real reason why the other 50% of my classmates couldn’t make it to the reunion.
You can’t get there from here. The town has an airport, but planes don’t fly into it anymore.
My trip was a comedy of errors. You can fly but I could reach Paris quicker than Huron, South Dakota. Lotsa layovers. The last plane gets you sorta close. Then you rent a car. And drive another 200 miles.
FORGET THAT!!! I'm gonna drive the whole way! But I can't. Because I have an old car. Okay... fine! I've needed a new car forever, I'll buy a car!
DONE & DONE! Bought the car, hit the road, took me two days.
So I guess you could say... I shelled out $50,000 to avoid paying $600 bucks for a plane ticket. That could get me there twice as fast.
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| Mountain Cornflower (centaurea montana) Comes back every year. Generally in all the spots you don't want her to be. |
I’m from one of those little prairie towns that just couldn’t get their act together. And by that, I mean, they were scared. Progress and income, jobs and careers - good things - relevant to the survival of such towns. But they didn't feel safe enough to say yes to new businesses that could give their high school graduates a reason to stay.
And we all know how that ends. The town keeps spiraling downward until it is damn near impossible to find a decent cup of coffee. Much less a tasty croissant. 😉
I had a wonderful time. I really did! I mean once I started figuring out who those people were? It was awesome.
And I also had a wonderful summer. The months went by in a blink. As did the years.
