Lighting, Thunder, and Rain Welcome Dawn

Al fresco dining

Pre Prandial Cocktails

I especially like yesterday's entry from SUNDIAL OF THE SEASONS, so I include it below, because it explains so well my feelings about travel and the return: enjoy

“Homecoming”, from Hal Borland’s SUNDIAL OF THE SEASONS

More than half the pleasure of going is in the return, as any traveler knows.  To go, to see the far place, the place beyond the horizon, is exciting; but to return is satisfying as few other things can ever be.  To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.known street or park.  Home, where one can feel and touch and see and find comfort in familiar things.  The place where one belongs.

Man, being man and an ambulatory creature with a degree of restlessness in his blood, must be up and gone from time to time.  He must go, if only to assure himself that the horizon has no boundary.  He must move from here to yonder, if only to know that he is neither slave nor prisoner.  What are hills for, if not to have a father side?  And what is the purpose of that distant rim of sky if not to lure a man beyond his own small orbit?  But once one has gone, one must come back.

And that is the final satisfaction of a trip, whether it is a vacation or just a journey -- the return itself.  The homecoming.  The trip back, and the home at the end.  To go is good, but to come back is best.

Few of us are that kind of traveler who can be at home forever away from home.  The new, the strange and the different have their lure, but one needs a place to call his own.  One needs to belong somewhere, to feel the roots, however tenuous, of identity with place.  Home, we call it, whether it be a room or a house or an apartment, a farm or a plot of grass or a well-

More Bro's

Bean Baggers

Patsi and Linda

 I sit here, listening to the thunder, awed by lightning, though the rains have not arrived. Perhaps we will miss the storm though it sounds as if its rolling over the roof of our house.  I assume it has awoken Evie as she finds it difficult to sleep with the thunder and lightning so she should be up soon.  It's a humid morning, about 64 degrees, and we have some rain forecast on and off during the day.  Some sun later perhaps, with a high of 82 and higher tomorrow, typical for the start of school.  I always remember the heat and humidity of my first days at school when I was young, returning home to a lake that was still inviting despite the summer being over. Actually, the gentle rain is competing with NPR, enough so that I have gotten up and turned off the radio to just listen to its patter.  It seems like its been a summer with rains in short supply though we certainly got enough in April, May and June.  I can just imagine my new grass seed embracing and soaking in the luxuriance of this rain, stretching its seedlings upwards toward the warmth to come(a bit much, don't you think...I am trying to hard).