sunshine on my shoulders

Not that the sun is exactly shining right now, but it has been for most of the month of May.  Overnight, it seems, our yard has turned green and leaves have burst out on the trees.  There is leaf shade out our western windows and dappled light dancing on our walls, and the purple smell of lilacs in the air.  Ahhh.

Sometimes I like to go away for holiday weekends.  Over President's Day weekend we headed west to visit Andrea and Philip in Bellingham.  It was a lovely ski-to-sea weekend.  Cross-country skiing in glorious feet of snow near Mt. Baker?  Check!  Ferry ride to Lummi Island?  Check!  Donuts from Rocket Donuts?  Check!  A hike in the fern-draped forests of Lummi?  Check!

This weekend, however, we decided to stay put, and there is something so delightfully delicious about a "staycation."  We've slept in every day, puttered around in the garden, read books, taken long ambling hikes in the wildflower-laden hills.  Several friends have visited from out of town, and it's been good to reconnect and enjoy their company.

Last weekend Greg led a botany field weekend for the Montana Natural History Center, a slightly more advanced course created for Master Naturalist students.  I chose to attend as well, and we (along with seven other Master Naturalists, including Greg's parents) had an intense but lovely weekend learning about plant families and how to key out wildflowers.  We would arrive at a trailhead, walk seven steps, see a flower, then hunker down, pulling out our Vascular Plants of Montana books, then counting petals, stamens, pistils, peering through our hand lenses, and carefully dissecting the flowers with our forceps in an attempt to gather all the crucial information.

New definition of nerd:  one who actually enjoys having a plant in one hand and a dry, nearly picture-less book in the other, trying to determine whether the plant in hand has "involucral bracts with pectinately arranged processes about 1mm long toward tip" or "involucral bracts not as above."  Yes, this process does involve frequently referencing the glossary . . . which often involves referencing the glossary.  For example:  I flip to the glossary to look up "involucral."  I find that "involucre" is defined as a "whorl of bracts or small leaves subtending a flower or flower cluster."  I then look up "bract," which is a "reduced or modified leaf often in the inflorescence." I then look up "inflorescence," which is the "flowering part of a plant."  By this time I've forgotten what I was looking up in the first place . . . and I still have to look up "pectinate" and "process."  My other option, last weekend, was to call, "GREG??  Help!" which often resulted in reaching the answer much more quickly.  :)

Despite a forecast of rain for both last Saturday and Sunday (70% on Saturday and 60% on Sunday), we were blessed with two utterly glorious warm, sunny days, and the rain only came in the last half hour of the class on Sunday, just as we arrived back at MNHC for a debrief of the weekend.  Excellent timing.

We spent some time drawing some of the flowers we'd seen over the weekend, and put all our drawings together in a lovely little booklet.  Here's a sampling (this is very like the kinds of entries I make in my field journal.  Sketching is just one of the many reasons I love field journaling!):

I drew Disporum trachycarpum, rough-fruited fairybells, in the lily family:

Greg drew some bright blue forget-me-nots (borage family),

and Bill drew arrowleaf balsamroot (aster family), which are blooming in profusion all over the hillsides of Mt. Jumbo.

All in all, it was a delightful weekend.

As I mentioned earlier, we've also had some good friends in town over the past couple of weeks.  My dear friend Rachel is here for a few weeks, on her summer break from her job with the Uganda Studies Program in Mukono, Uganda.  It's been wonderful to have her here, and to share tea, dinner, ice cream, and ambles in the hills.  Greg's friend Bill visited for a few days as well, and we went for a beautiful hike on the Mt. Jumbo saddle with both him and Rachel.  A few pictures from our hike:

The hillside awash in arrowleaf balsamroot.

Arrowleaf balsamroot up close.  Fun fact:  this "flower" is made up of myriad flowers--two different types, disk flowers and ray flowers.  The ray flowers are the tiny yellow cups in the middle, and the disk flowers are the yellow "petals" on the outside.  Cool, eh?

A silly moment.

Me and Rachel in the wildflowers.

Looking down the hill into the Missoula valley.  I so love living in this place!

My friend and former co-worker Jessie was in town just for the Memorial Day weekend, and we took yet another hike up Jumbo, on a loop that I've never been on before.  It was stunningly beautiful.  Our hike was sandwiched by rain showers, and the grey clouds and damp air brought out the deep green of the ponderosa pines and douglas firs and the leaves of the flowers.

We saw not only balsamroot and larkspur and prairie stars, but shooting stars and even two buttercups that were just starting to bloom--buttercups, the first flower of spring, ones that are rare to see in early May much less almost June.  We also saw lupine and bluebells, Indian paintbrush and heart-leafed arnica, kittentails and pussytoes.  The diversity of wildflowers was a gift.

Rain showers washing over the Missoula valley, bringing out (and on) the green.

Today we planted our corn seeds (!), as well as beans and squash, and Greg has also been working on the chicken coop.  The chickies are seven weeks old today, and we'll be able to put them outside soon!  Only a few more months until we get our own eggs . . . I can't wait.

My stomach tells me it is lunchtime, so off I go.  A happy Memorial Day to all!