Gratitude #65

Hello and welcome to my June gratitude post. I'll be linking up with LeeAnna at Not Afraid of Color where you can get the links to others who post. In these unstable alarming times, it is good for my mental health to remember to note things for which I am grateful.

1. I am eternally grateful for our back yard. Having a calm, green, quiet and private or mostly private place in which to have morning coffee, afternoon tea, or to float in my pool chair reading or sky-gazing is important for my overall well-being. We spent five summers on the other side of Kingsville, where we had a beautiful back garden and lake view, not really a yard there, but neighbours with whom we literally shared a patio (it was a duplex) and well, it just got too close and claustrophobic for us. Prior to that we'd lived on 3.5 acres so it was a bit too much of a drastic change!

Mug cosy on to keep the tea warm and bugs out. Current book: One Two Three a recommendation from Bernie at Needle & Foot, (just excellent, highly recommend!). This is my 20th book for the year.

This month I also read Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone by Diana Gabaldon, which I loved, lived and dreamed in the entire almost 900 pages. Ahhh. However, I had thought this was the last one in the epic series! Hope we don't have to wait seven long years for the next one. Another great read this past month, one of the Canada Reads nominations, was Five Little Indians by Michelle Good. And the fourth one for the month was The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, one of Barack Obama's Top 20 for 2021. It was different, and once I kind of sorted out the various points of view, pretty gripping, about a Ponzi scheme that collapses.

2.  I like this article by Dr. Suzanne Simard, leader of the Mother Tree Project, which says much about my view of forests.

3. I absolutely love the skit the Queen did with Paddington. She really tries to be with it, doesn't she?!

4. I am pretty sure I've mentioned this Bhangra group before, but they showed up on The Rick Mercer Report which comes on after our CBC Windsor News, and it made me google them. Enjoy this super-short video from 2016...

and a more recent one from 2019, with women dancing too (YASS!). All their videos are in aid of fundraising for various causes. Bhangra is a dance of supreme joy, traditionally done by farmers to celebrate good things on the farm.

5. I've said several times how much I like Seth’s Blog. Wow, did this post EVER hit home. It is on skepticism, "a virtue", and denial, "a willful rejection of reality". It helps me deal with the deniers, because I will never understand them, as hard as I have tried over the past two years. 

6. If you need a lift for your spirits, check out this short video where an Animal Rescue worker reunites ducklings with their mama after they fell down a drain grid.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ce66kiCDBGI/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

7. I love my calla lilies which MacGyver, who also loves gardening, overwintered in this south-facing bed against the house. It has mulch, and then he covered the mulch with a layer of straw for more insulation, as an experiment. Normally they recommend taking out the bulbs, and storing them in a dark place over the winter. Well, all five have come bak, and come back in spades. This particular plant's flower stems are 29" high! I know because I measured.

Can you see the tip of an orange one peeking out to the left of the yellow ones?

8. I LOVED seeing this on CBC News!! Westmoreland Topline Farms, a greenhouse right in my neighbourhood has found a way thanks to a California company, Apeel Sciences, to remove the plastic wrapping from English cucumbers and still ensure their freshness!! The amount of plastic this will save is mind boggling.

Right around the same time as that story, was I ever happy to buy a loaf of bread for MacGyver and find this cardboard bread tag on it instead of the single-use plastic ones! Both of these developments give me some hope for our planet.

9. One of the houses in our loop as this fun face on their huge maple. Trees are sentient beings, and do communicate with each other. That's a link to an article in the Smithsonian Magazine. I've just put Peter Wohlleben's book, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, on hold in our library.

10. At the end of May and first week of June I was treated to the most spectacular display of blossoms on the Beauty Bush between our house and the neighbours'. Our bedroom is upstairs so that gives you an idea of the height of this bush!

11. I am so grateful for friends who are family. Such is John, for whom I made this quilt a few years ago, when he turned 75. He painted his shed this spring, and sent me a photo when it was done.

He knows how much this means to me to take the time to hang it, photograph it (front and back!) and send it to me.

12. I feel so blessed to be within a 2-minute walk to Lake Erie, and a 10-minute drive to Seacliff Beach, great spot for beach glass and lucky stones. Lucky stones are actually otoliths, the fossilized ear bones of a sheepshead, a type of fish. Sound waves on these ear bones make a 'J' or an 'L' pattern on the bone, said to be for Joy and Luck. I found one of each on the walk where I took some photos of 'Crystal Constellations', the throw quilt I made for my annual quilt along.

The marina, a wonderful place to walk.

You can walk all the way along the marina waterfront and along the beach which is to the west of the marina. I will be back many times this summer, some of them with a certain grandson who is coming to stay with us for almost three weeks! I'll be taking off most of the month of July from blogging, but I'll post from time to time on Instagram @mmmquilts.

From that marina and beach trip, here is one more photo of my QAL quilt. Here is the pattern or click the link in my sidebar. I plan to get two, perhaps three more patterns published this summer.