Future Food - Hamilton, Montana

Wee world within a world! 
While not quite as small as Who-ville, the intricacy within this blossom (pepper or perhaps tomatillo?) was delightfully diverting during our wait on Fiesta en Jalisco's patio in Hamilton, Montana. (Plus we loved the owner's creativity in nestling veggie plants in the same planter as summer flowers.)

Green Leaf Joy and Shadow - Missoula, Montana

"....What is all this juice and all this joy?         

   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,         

   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning..." 

- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), from Spring

On The (Eventual) Return To The Office - Missoula, Montana

"...No Skype chat can replicate what [Thomas] Heatherwick calls the “chemistry of the unexpected” that you get in person. Offices may not fill the pages of poetry anthologies but, says [Lucy] Kellaway, they “can be as moving as anywhere on Earth. Because what moves us is not sitting at our computer, it’s the relationship that we have with people.”
...When Wordsworth seems to have grown a trifle too smug about the sublime joys of the natural world, [Charles] Lamb snapped back. “I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life.” But he did care for the city and he certainly loved offices. All his complaints were, he wrote, mere “lovers’ quarrels”...-Catherine Nixey, in her online article "Death of the Office", The Economist, June/July 2020

Treat yourself to the entire delightfully history-spattered article here. 
And be fully present, wherever you are, in this very minute.

 

Slow Autumn - Grant Creek, Missoula, Montana

....odd to see an abundance of green leaves AFTER we've had our first snow! But the inevitable change is underway... 

 

September Snow - Missoula, Montana

After some pseudo-snow-spit last night, the forecast downfall materialized for real (shocker!) this morning in Missoula town proper. But I'm thankful it's not the 2-feet-&-counting in Browning & other Montana towns further north.

(And still my summer petunias bloom fiercely on...)

 

Sunlight Secrets - Missoula, Montana

"But when the sunlight dies away
Let the delicious secret out
To every breeze that roams about..."

- From The Light Of The Haram by Thomas Moore (1779–1852)

Wishing For Sky - Missoula, Montana

"All stories are love stories. 
Paul remembered someone famous saying that...All men get the things they love. 
The tragedy of some men is not that they are denied, but that they wish they'd loved something else."

-From The Last Days of Nightt by Graham Moore, p. 26

Seriously Spring - Missoula, Montana

A fabulous evening for ice cream at Sweet Peaks! 
(Griz Tracks flavour for me - click here to make your mouth water. Their website indicates ice cream ships every Wednesday to anywhere in the lower 48 United States...just sayin'....)

Next up: a calorie off-setting stroll downtown along the Clark Fork River.

And after that, we finally had supper - legendary Mo Club burgers. 
The Best Husband Ever observed that they are cooking on the same grill as decades ago when his dad ate there as a young man, and the long-time seasoning of the grill contributes to the special taste of their burgers.

A veritable best-of-Missoula evening!

Never Too Late - Missoula, Montana

This little shock of new green caught my eye - unrepentant, these late-springing greens shall have their day in the sun along with their earlier-matured kin. 

"...Nothing is too late, till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate..."

- from Morituri Salutamus: Poem for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of 1825 in Bowdoin College by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Green Leaves, Blue Sky - Missoula, Montana

"A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself." 

- Emile M. Cioran

Hmmmm...ponder that a while....

Focused Up - Missoula, Montana

"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed." - C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Magician's Nephew (The Chronicles of Narnia)

I could possibly stretch the 'focus up' aspect of today's spring leaves in contrast to the quote topic, but 'stretch' would be the operative word. Today's quote doesn't really have much anything to do with the picture, but it did make me laugh out loud yesterday, while listening to the audiobook during my lunchtime walk. Laughing from a place of empathy and personal experience, of course. Lewis aptly put into plain speech the fallacy of trying to make ourselves believe less than what we know to be true. And yet, we often insist on taking the long, dusty road to learning that vulnerable honesty is so much simpler than clutching tightly to our so-called pride. May Heaven help us to persist in shortening that worthwhile journey.

Maple Green Details, Missoula, Montana

One result of posting a daily photo is that I notice more detail in my daily surroundings, such as how spring greening and budding is spaced out over a fair stretch of time. The tint of these maple leaves is still brightly new, yet other tree leaves have already progressed to deeper verde hues. A distance of merely 45 miles may also affect timing; when the grape hyacinths in our Missoula yard were fully blown, the ones at our Hamilton cottage still tightly clasped their buds.

Green Leaves, Blue Sky, Missoula, Montana

Imagine you are laying on your back, gazing placidly up at the blue, blue, Montana sky through a lacy veil of new spring leaves…. Inhale slowly, exhale slowly…. repeat as needed.