Today, all four of us made it into the city for a family get together.  It made for a very long and painful day for my husband, but he hasn’t seen his sister in 4 years.  She flies home soon, so he wasn’t about to miss this chance.  It was so great to see everyone and spend time with them.  It is a rare thing for everyone to be together at the same time, these days.

With all this wonderful rain we’ve been having, it’s just fantastic to see everything so GREEN, everywhere.  Even the drive into the city looked completely different.

A short time ago, the trees were just showing green leaves, while everything else looked like the dead growth from last year that you can still see in the ditch.  Now, it’s like the trees all just exploded in green.

(Also, I’m amused by the fact that there is a reflection of me driving, hovering in the sky. 😀 )

When we got home, we found all sorts of cats had missed our company!

The inside cats were very curious about Nasty Crime boy.

It was a shared curiosity! 😀

I’m loving the long daylight hours, too.  Though we didn’t get home until past 8pm, there was still plenty of light, so I did a quick walk around the yard to see how things were.

The crab apple trees north of the spruce grove are finally blooming.  My sister and her husband pruned them back quite heavily last summer, but I can see that there are some dead branches that will need to be cut away.  These might have died off over the winter.

A few days ago, these linden leaves were just barely new leaf buds!

I had a chance to ask my mother about the linden tree, because it looks so different than I remember it.  So much so that, until the leaves unfurled, it looked like two different trees!  She told me that she used to cut back the suckers every year, but no one continued that after she went to the senior’s centre she now lives in.  That would explain why they look so different.  The growth at the base – where these leaves are – is only about 4-5 years old, whereas the trunk in the middle is more like 30-35 years old.

These lilies had been showing in green clusters but after the rain, they shot up several inches and threw out flower stocks and buds virtually overnight!

Rolando Moon approves.

I also did a basement check this evening, and the old part basement is bone dry, though there is some water in the sump pump reservoir.  Well below the level of the float.

We still need to get the old hot water tank out of there.  It’s much bigger and heavier than modern ones!

I was just thinking, as I wrote this, how I can’t remember the last time the old part basement was still dry this far into spring, and I remembered one year when it flooded.  This had to have happened before the new part was built, so I was probably about 6 years old, give or take a year or two.  I remember going part way down the stairs to see.  The water was a couple of feet deep – deep enough to cover several steps – and perfectly clean and clear.

Then, as I was looking, a frog went swimming past the bottom of the stairs!

I will never forget that frog! 😀

I hadn’t thought of that in years!

Funny how things trigger old memories of growing up in this house. 🙂

The Re-Farmer