I now feel qualified to answer the deeply significant question: If I could have only one or the other, which appliance I would keep, my stove or my refrigerator? No hesitation here. I would give up my refrigerator first. Cooking for a baker’s dozen last summer without a stove was way more challenging than working around no refrigerator.

This is not to say that I won’t be thrilled when Sears appears with the new refrigerator. Having to fruitlessly rifle through “Porn Star” then walk to Ben’s house for mayonnaise has probably been good for the health, but it gets old fast.

On the garden front, storms and cold rainy days have left the perennials leggy and drooping. I carry twine, stakes and scissors with me on my travels, trying to try up all the Roses and also retrieve the Peonies from their determined flumps onto the ground. The only saving grace of the nose dives is that they give me an excuse for cutting big bouquets of flumping Flowers for the house.

One plant in particular looks done in my the weather and doesn’t look any better when plucked for a vase. I speak here of the Irises. I am a bit of a nut about Bearded Iris, but I wonder if this is a Flower I should stop pursuing. They are easily damaged by storms and once again this June they have been knocked around in spite of careful staking.

If it’s not wind and rain that get them, it’s the dogs. Perhaps because of where I have placed the Iris along the edges of garden paths, the dogs frequently break off their Flower stalks. It is always a dramatic moment when I realize there will be virtually no Flowers on the Iris because MayMay wanted to beat Riley from the front yard to the back.

One patch did look glorious this year and was spared by MayMay, Riley, and Reina, earning an awful lot of Iris in the gardens a reprieve.

A fifth grade teacher friend in Ottawa asked her students to write the story of this photo.

No, it is not me after the Sears man tells me that Sears will replace our dead refrigerator…. though it does represent (in a rather epic way) the pleasure I felt knowing that my acquaintance with “Porn Star” was going to end after only a few weeks of stuffing 8 cubic feet of food in a 2 cubic foot space.

If you want to know what this moment really represents….Lizzy’s book fills in all the detail!

May was cool until the last few days so the Tulips stayed sassy for weeks.

Our Honeybees did a great job pollinating our Apple trees. Gorgeous blossoms are now tiny apples.

My fixation with Purple Sensation Allium left the gardens awash in these stunners.

Over Memorial Day weekend, we dashed up to Maine to see Emily graduate from college. A friend lent us his darling house in Damariscotta for the occasion. The house is the one that Jim and Ben re-roofed a few years back. It proved a lovely place to celebrate between official events. Hooray for Emily (who found herself hard at work at the farm a few short hours after graduation) !

We returned to gardens flooded in Tree Peonies. A brief heat wave had brought them all to flower overnight.

As we went to get the last of the gardens planted, the dogs remained in the thick of all planting activities.