bee balm | Gladsome Lights

This morning I walked to the neighborhood recreation center with the boys to play with their stomp rocket. We had a lot of fun, until suddenly the grass was itchy and they were hot and/or tired. We headed home to have a cold juice and play in the basement for a while.

After that we made paper fans, played War with a deck of cards, put together a puzzle of the world, played with trains, and made some progress on a large Lego project that is a bit too hard for their ages. Two Lego workers had only one tiny walkie-talkie between them, which didn’t bother the toys, but caused the boys to fight over it. I slipped it into my pocket to make peace.

In the afternoon Tom went out back to tend the little garden, and we all joined him. I identified a few plants with my Seek app — Scarlet Bee Balm is a favorite with the bees, who taste its value deep inside the narrow tubes that are its petals, even though the flowers generally look a little worse for wear. I put my nose down close and found that flower to be the sweetest of the collection. I’ve never grown it in my own garden, but I would like to.

One prickly looking plant was the Carolina Horsenettle, Solanum carolinense, not a true nettle but a member of the nightshade family, which has set fruit that looks like tomatoes. Horsenettles are evidently all toxic.

The whole back garden seems to have been planted with bees in mind: anise hyssop and echinacea were attracting three sorts of bees as well, and in the heat, the bees were moving fast. But I managed to take a few pictures!

Of course, every day is historic. Today grandson Brodie ate with a fork for the first time! And lest I forget, it’s the day of the Total Solar Eclipse 2017. My view was as at right.

Last week I was in Monterey, California, where the sky is also commonly white in the mornings. I’m guessing that today Soldier’s family couldn’t see the natural and rare wonder above the overcast there, either.

But as is also typical, during my brief visit the sun would come out within a few hours of the start of day, and we enjoyed many lovely walks in the neighborhood, and outings a little farther afield.

Earthbound Farm in Carmel Valley has paths to wander through various gardens with a teepee, a fort, a store and café, berry patches…

It is the perfect place to examine snails, red peppers growing, tiny leaves or flowers. Below is a weed I’ve often wanted to get a good picture of – it helps to have a boy’s finger for comparing size:

Laddie especially loved the aromatherapy chamomile labyrinth. I think he might have walked that path for an hour if we had not moved on.

In the Alphabet Garden we saw a plant, or at least a place where a plant had grown, for every letter, including Echinacea and Bean.

On our walks in the neighborhood we saw familiar flowers and plants that Liam and I have noticed many times now, as well as some new ones. I haven’t had time to research most of them, like this:

But I did learn Sea Lavender, what Liam described as having a rattle-like sound to the flower heads. Only the white parts are the true flowers, what I assume this bee is sipping at:

Flowers love to grow on California’s coast! Here are several more I don’t know – if any of my readers knows them, please share.

Below, a tall bush in Soldier and Joy’s back yard:

Awfully fancy, this one:
Joy and I drove down to the Monterey Bay Recreational Trail and walked with three boys, two bikes, a double stroller and a baby pack. We looked for a long time into the water next to the boat docks and I saw my first jellyfish and skate not in an aquarium, plus lots of hermit crabs scuttling in and out of rock crevices. It was beautiful down there.

I have been to visit Monterey twice this summer, to offer a little adult company to Joy while Soldier is working on the east coast. So we chatted and talked and talked some more, which may have been the cause of the boys being even more rambunctious than usual. I was amazed at how when it involves three boys ages 5, 3, and 1, every activity, even something as soothing as Grandma reading to them, devolves into roughhousing.

I don’t have a good picture of that. Just imagine a tangle of six arms, six legs, giggling faces and tousled hair, all somehow hanging on to my lap, with an open storybook underneath it all. It was a multi-sensory experience that will go down in my history book as a sunny day.