she’s all growed up, and a nadventure

Just the other day I was posting about the gap-toothed innocence of a particular brown-eyed susan I’ve been photographing every day, and that post got a lot of comments and traffic and praise and whatnot, particularly in the open.salon.com community where I cross-post.

Well, our beauty hit adolescence the very next day.

“You posted my photo where?”

She got all shy, and covered up her bug-eaten petal with a neighboring petal.

And the day after that?

Check out the outer edge of the disk at the center – the flowers are opening up. (You realize this is a compound flower, right? Those petals are actually ‘rays’, and that brown center is one gazillion tiny individual flowers.)

Let’s dive in.

see?

and then the day after THAT – which is today – another row opened up.

So now we know this happens from the outside, in. Good to know. 

In the meantime, the milkweed nearby has undergone a similar transformation over the past three days.

three days ago.

two days ago.

!! yesterday !!

…and today. The first milkweed right around here to pop.

The summer solstice also brought a birthday to my sweet love. We played hooky from all commitments, and went kayaking down in Massachusetts at Bartons Cove, on the Connecticut River.

The rest of these are all cell phone pictures so the quality is meh, but hey, there you go.

He Who Abides. When he wears this shirt, he’s regularly mistaken for Jeff Bridges. Well, no. People mistake the image of Jeff Bridges on the shirt, for him. Yo, Jeff: it must be frustrating being mistaken for Kevin so often!

Kevin counted 31 Canada geese. Having recently read Bernd Heinrich’s book about Canada geese, it was cool to see the mixed families that occur once the families move from breeding grounds to feeding grounds a couple of days after the goslings hatch. This bunch looked like a school outing – at least four pairs of adults, and the rest, little ones.

We explored rocky coves. A great blue heron glided in for a landing on shore right behind me a second after I took this picture.

water + rocks = heaven

After a couple of hours on the water we went on A Nadventure. We checked out the glacial potholes in Shelburne Falls – a great little town, and site of my first 10K three years ago. Alas, they’ve locked down access to the falls so you can’t scramble around on the rocks anymore. Grrrr.

drool.

We also checked out the Bridge of Flowers – a foot bridge planted on either side with a dizzying array of roses, lilies, and God knows what else.

lupine on LSD?

It was pointless to try and capture it with a cell phone camera, but I couldn’t resist these two. Utterly ridiculous.

After that, we figured, in for a penny, in for a pound, and drove clear across Massachusetts

Looking north into Vermont.

…til practically New York, then swung north into Vermont, and back across the state til we got home, whereupon I whomped up a strawberry rhubarb pie AND escargot in garlic butter for the birthday boy.

A fine day.