Lovely Fridays

It is Friday and I am so happy. My back yard is green and the trees are filled with lacy new leaves. It really does
look like a place to spend long hours in just being outside. I am so thankful for spring. I went outside to the mailbox and the smell of orange blossoms is so sweet. I just want to stand and breathe. My sister in law's old, old Wisteria is covered in purple blossoms. What I love about her wisteria is that it is maybe 100 years old or older. It grew on an old arbor that was with the original old farm house. The people who homesteaded this place had all kinds of vines growing every where and trees and shrubs that would bloom all year long. After the wisteria stops blooming the old trees start changing from purple to white as the old locust trees start blooming. The old house was originally surrounded by old elm trees but they got dutch elm disease in the 70s and 80s and there are so few left.
The old farm house didn't have a cooler or anything so they put in trees to keep things cool. There was a lovely screened porch on the back of the house.
A man was talking to my brother the other day and he told him that when he was a young man, this place was a dairy. There was an old milk house when we moved here and he told my brother that was where they filled the milk cans. I know why when we moved here there were so many milk cans around.

There was  milk house and  next to it was the pump house. On the outside of that growing all over it was trumpet vine and I would sit out on the back porch and watch the hummingbirds in the summer. Out in front on the house next door are two very old palm trees. When we moved here owls lived in them. One day I was riding my bike down the street, and the owls had a nest in one of them. That mother owl flew down and knocked me off my bike. My feet were all tangled up in the bike and every time I raised my head she would fly down and try to hit me. I was so scared. My grandpa had a old truck sitting there and I watched her as she flew up to make another pass and I jumped up and crawled away to the truck. It was starting to get dark and my knees and elbows were skinned, no one was home at my grandparents, so I jumped out of the truck and headed for home.

I know now I must have scared my Dad to death, dirty and bleeding but he grabbed a shot gun and took off down there. The owl came out of the palm tree and my Dad made me stand my ground, while he shot her.
I was sick she was only protecting her babies, and I guess Dad was only protecting me. After that though,
no more owls ever lived in the palm trees.

It always makes me sad about that. One summer before the above incident,  we were all sitting out under the trees playing with some new kittens when a owl flew down out of the tree and picked up one of the kittens and took off to the top of the tree. We were all sitting there opened mouth. The kitten was heavier than the owl realized. We grabbed gravel that was there and started chunking the owl and the kitten was fighting and the owl dropped the kitten.The owl that knocked me off my bike was a barn owl and the one that grabbed the kitten was a great horned owl.
That kitten never was right after that. It always ducked every time anything flew over or ran for it's life.
In the spring when I walk around and look at the things growing. I see all of these things in my mind.
I have been so blessed.
Thank you so much for reading my stories of springs and summers past. I do hope you have a lovely
weekend,
~Kim~