This First Day of Summer

        This first day of summer started just like I knew it would....the birds are singing, roosters are crowing, chicks are peeping, donkeys are braying and the sheep are baaing. This is the way most summer mornings start but today is special because it is the first day of my favorite time of year. As I walk to the barn this morning to do the milking, the misty fog wraps around the hills of this old farm. I have come to love this morning fog. It will stay with us, right up until fall. It coats every living thing with it's moisture. Every little blossom and leaf and spider web, leaving behind millions of tiny, sparkling jewels in it's wake. It makes little rivulets that run down every leaf of the corn, delivering water right at the roots where it needs it. I have to take a towel out and run it down each clothes line before I can hang out clothes. If you walk under the willow, it will drop on you like it's a shower, running down your back until you shiver. Living in this deep holler, the sun doesn't reach us until about 8:30 or 9 in the morning. This allows us to get an hour or two of work done in the cool, damp mornings of summer. You can watch the sun begin to shine through the woods above the pasture and then it finally clears the trees and bathes the farm in sunlight. By 5 or 6 in the afternoon, it has reached the hill on the other side of us, and we are back in the cool shade, allowing us to work in the garden in the cool evening. The evening sky is once again lit up with hundreds of lightening bugs. They dance and sparkle just like the jewels of the morning. How lucky we are to be surrounded with God's beauty!