Back in the Hunt!

It has been a month and a day since I got my new knee.  Generally speaking, I am doing well with it.  I'm still battling the fatigue factor but I am hopeful that that will go away soon.

  

In this past month, I have done very little with my camera but I did manage to put a few together for this week's Scavenger Hunt.   Here are the prompts for this week:  Home or Thankful, In the Kitchen, Couple, Bubbles and Trees.  And here are my entries:

Home sweet home!

Here's a glimpse of my merry, messy kitchen.

A couple of cute little visitors to our bird feeder.

I have a bottle bubbles and intended to take a picture of a few of them floating around, but it was so windy here yesterday that they just kept flying toward the house and getting stuck on the slider.  So this is what I got.

This is our European Beech tree that  sits in our front yard.  It's a beautiful tree and always the last to lose its leaves every year.

Linking to Ashley Sisk's Scavenger Hunt Sunday.

Ode to our magnolia…

When we moved into this house more than ten years ago, it was in the middle of December.  Consequently, we really didn’t have any idea as to what was planted in our yard.  Over the next year, it was fun to see what popped open in the spring and hung around in the summer.  The person who lived here before must have been a pretty good gardener…something I am not.  There are bulbs that come up every year, daylilies galore and there are gorgeous white azaleas and rhododendrons that, when they bloom, look like clouds that have fallen in front of our house. 

And in our back yard on the edge of the woods there is a magnolia tree.  I fell in love with this tree the first year I saw it in bloom.  So I was horrified this past October after the freak snowfall when we realized that the tree had snapped in two under the weight of the heavy snow.  But apparently, the loss of a limb, even a major one, is not enough to have this tree give up the ghost and it bloomed again this year.  The blooms are not as profuse as in the past years.  But the magnolia did set its buds and brought forth some flowers that are beautiful even if they are a little brown around the edges because of our dry spring.

 

I suppose that the tree never had a moment’s thought that it wouldn’t bloom as I had feared would happen because of such major damage.  Such is the tenacity of wild life and my personal tendency toward despair sometimes.  It has been an uplifting sight looking out at the blooms that are now beginning to fade and drop to the ground because that is what they are supposed to do while the waxy green leaves are beginning to emerge.

 

Nature’s perseverance and persistence always puts hope in my heart and I stand here in awe of it.

A is for Angel Oak…

The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber.  The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.

  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

It’s hard to describe the feeling I got when I first saw this magnificent tree.  At first, I wanted to just stand and stare at it.  Then I got an indescribable urge to touch it and feel the life within it.  It is truly a force of nature, the Angel Oak.  This gorgeous old live oak tree is purportedly the oldest living thing east of the Mississippi River.  Its branches stretch to a diameter of 160 feet.  The circumference of its trunk is almost 25 feet and it covers 17,100 square feet of ground.  Simply magnificent!

It is hard to believe that over the years, man has not found a reason to get rid of this old tree.  The fact that is it is still around and lovingly tended gives me hope.  “Recorded history traces the ownership of the live oak and surrounding land back to the year 1717 when Abraham Waight received it as part of a small land grant.  The tree stayed in the Waight family for four generations and was part of a Marriage Settlement to Justus Angel and Martha Waight Tucker Angel.”  It is now in a public park.

I have to thank my cousin-in-law, Joyce P., for nudging us to drive out to look at this wonderful tree.  Thanks, Joyce!  It was well worth it. 

So I managed to mangle the alphabet putting the “B” before the “A” but I don’t think anyone really cares.