The sky is blazed with blueness today and the sun shines yellow and bright. The birds are happily feeding and singing and talking with their mates. Their musical score is a beautiful euphony of sounds and songs. Three squirrels discovered the feeders in the flower bed and were chowing down till I ran them off and greased the poles. Guess the critter food is not to their liking. I’ll pour some sunflower seeds in their bowl of corn.

My garden is really doing well. Have a little squash just forming and the cucumbers are blooming. My tomatoes are growing but slow to bloom. My cantaloupe hasn’t grown any since I planted it. Maybe I haven’t talked to it enough. Grew a big cantaloupe in a wheelbarrow of flowers last year and went to pick it and something had eaten half of it! Probably Grandpa raccoon. It was a volunteer plant from some cantaloupe rinds I put out for the birds. My zinnias and sunflower are growing, too. Can’t wait to see them bloom and all their beautiful butterfly friends that visit them.

My grandchildren got out of school today for the summer. I can remember how exciting it was to get out of school for the summer. The prospect of going barefooted, going swimming and the happy freedom of riding bicycles and roller skating all around town, drinking cherry cokes and lemon sours from the drug store. When my baby brother and I were in elementary school we’d always look forward to the last day of school and hurry home to our sandpile. Daddy would always fill the sandpile with a fresh load of white sand on the last day of school and Mama would buy us each a bag of little green plastic soldiers. We’d take our shoes off and head for the sandpile and have a little war with the soldiers. When the war took a cease fire, we’d try to dig to China. I just wonder if my grandchildren have ever tried to dig to China. We’d dig in the sandbox till we hit the brown dirt of the yard and we’d think we were almost there.

I researched this and found out baby brother and I would miss China and come out somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean. We’d have to visit Argentina or Chile to dig to China. Japanese kids dig in their sandboxes for Brazil! Wonder where China children dig to, probably the United States. Gonna ask my grandchildren if they’ve ever tried to dig to China and see what they say. “We don’t stop playing because we grow old…we grow old because we stop playing,” George Bernard Shaw. Gonna get me sandbox and try digging to China!

Today’s sunset was captured perfectly in this quote by George Bernard Shaw. “Bursts of gold on lavender melting onto saffron. It’s the time of day when the sun looks like it has been spray painted by a graffiti artist.” I don’t know how I got addicted to watching the sunset each day. I just love anticipating the color scheme of Mother Nature’s watercolors and she never disappoints. I feel she paints a masterpiece for God’s eyes and shares her paintings with us when the clouds don’t cover her canvas.

Our lives can be so hectic in the modern world and a glimpse of a wondrous sunset can give pause to our lives as we watch the sky changing colors. The beauty of the sunset encourages us to be grateful for the simple wonders of nature and the mysteries of life. You cannot watch the sunset and not feel the presence of God in the heavens. “Once you have tasted the sky, you will forever look up,” Leonardo da Vinci.

“Sunsets, like childhood, are viewed with wonder not just because they are beautiful, but because they are fleeting.” — Richard Paul Evans