kind of like an avalanche

I'm still reeling backwards but not tonight.  Tonight, it's today, and yesterday, and the day before.  Okay?

This last week our slow, cold spring took a leap forward.  Now, all three meals are consumed outside.  Morning coffee's in the front porch swing, eyes sweeping up to the rapidly waning snow line.

Speckled baby robins hop about our yard and iridescent hummingbirds buzz past our ears.  Every morning a red-tailed hawk rides the thermals up, up, up that sentinel of a mountain.  Western meadowlarks sing with wreckless abandon stamped yellow on the treetop.  Mourning doves fool the kids into believing they're owls.  My first-ever tulips smack me daily with their robust beauty.

Four-year-old conversations bounce from God to pollination to death to nutrition to the locations of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.  Hazel joins the conversation with a two-year-old's sense of dictatorship.  ("NO!  It's NOT a bee!  It's a WASP.")  I furiously dig, plant, tend.  Corn and beans are tucked snuggly into warm, moist soil.  New beds are going in, new trees, new shrubs.  Hazel my sidekick helps me water and pat seeds into the ground.  Juniper swims through her thick, busy pretend world, coming up for air and roping us in.  

:: Snaps.  From today, yesterday, the day before, and probably the day before that.

:: Front porch breakfasts.

:: Short, open, garden fence under construction so we can let the chickens into our yard again.  Also, where I toil.    

:: Childhood was meant to be played dirty.  My future flower bed, current mud pit:    

:: Lunch at the picnic table.  (After clogging the drain with bath numero uno.  Hey Jasmine, now I know what you do with that outdoor shower!)      

:: Front porch horseplay.  

(The crib is in limbo; nobody sleeping out there or anything.)  

:: My latest apple tree--Norkent--gracing the garden.

:: Along the driveway and below the dining room window.  Late last summer this was a weedy, gravely patch of blech.  My man made the beds, I tucked in the bulbs.  It is young and has some filling-out to do, but I know it will happen.

:: Saturday we went to the Old West Days parade.  Juniper and a friend pounced at candy while Hazel stayed in the stroller, covered her eyes and surreptitiously ate Juniper's candy.  

:: What my husband does with the kids when I go to some hippie class on growing herbs.  Pajama hikes to an avalanche:

:: Hazel.  The fearless, accomplished climber.

:: Juniper has been obsessed with the book and video series, "The Magic School Bus."  Anytime we see a school bus it's magic, and she watches with awe and expectation.  Like it's going to shrink, turn into a bee and fly into a hive.

Me, earlier that day:  "Juniper, do you want me to do your hair today?"

Juniper:  "Um, no thanks.  Leave it down.  I like it that way; it's kind of like an avalanche."  

:: We sold the camper trailer we bought when Hazel was 4 months old.  It served us well for those early years, but we are so happy to have it off our hands.  We drove to our old friend's house for a bar-b-que and camped in their yard.  Hello, new family tent!  Purportedly, in a sever wind and snow storm, you will be the last tent standing.  Shall we put you to the test?