A fine start to summer

- Miss Sunflower -

If you're driving down our road, our house is the one with the row of sunny flowers out front. Each sunflower has its own sweet face and personality. The lady in the picture is a winsome and pretty girl with slightly windblown hair.

I'm a complainer, but even I can't complain about the weather we've had this June. We've only had a day or two of hundred-degree temperatures and we've had a lot of rain. I remember in 1988, when my boy was born, I was big fat pregnant and it had already hit 104 before mid-May. So, this spring and summer start has been a good-un.

There's a lot of bird drama going on in the yard here. Guys chasing ladies, babies being fed, ol' mockingbird singing the news in a flurry of different dialects. We had some baby scissortails that jumped the nest, which is probably a normal occurrence in nature and is how birds learn to fly, but not a safe bet in a yard with two cats hunched down just waiting for a feathery snack. We pulled the truck up in the yard and, standing on top of it, tried to put a chick back in the nest, but that just made the other one jump. Scissortails are fierce and the parents were pretty upset about us sticking our hands in their nest and carrying their babies around. I finally made a Dr. Pepper nest, cutting up a soda box and tying it up in the tree with a shoelace. I let it be, after that. Either the babies learned to fly, the cats ate them, or they are desiccating in the handmade nest.

We've got three huge gardens, not much thanks to me. The squash are growing faster than we can pick them and the okra is coming on. Tons of cucumbers, too, and we ate our first watermelon yesterday. We're hoping the pumpkins last through the summer heat, it would be a nice boon to see them growing big and orange come fall.

The oilfield activity is growing at a gradual rate out here. It looks like we've been surveyed but I haven't seen any permits, yet. There's someone, or some group, in Scurry county naming oil well leases after Pink Floyd songs. So far, they've got Money, Comfortably Numb, and Another Brick in the Wall. If I were given a choice for naming my hypothetical lease, it would just be Templeton.