A Bountiful Summer

Although the the weather has been cooler than normal... the vegetation around here doesn't seem to mind. Some of you, in other parts of the country, might be surprised to hear that we are just staring to get tomatoes out of our kitchen garden, here in the mountains of Virginia. The zucchini and beans are just starting to bloom. Of course the weather in Virginia, as my husband always says, is a model of what weather should be. The Winters are wintry, the Springs are full of blooms, the Summers are pleasantly warm, and the Falls... they are full of rich beautiful color! This year, we fretted over our patch of huckleberries to the point that we might have worried them to death. The more we anticipated lovely purple fruit, the more we lost. (It could have been our neighborhood bear or birds or something else...) So the berries we planned for, never came to fruition. However, our Lord is a gracious God and where he denied us huckleberries, he gave us blackberries instead! The blackberries we found were ripe and sweet and as big as your thumb. Gracious me... and to cap off the Lord's gift he surrounded the bushes with beautiful wildflowers! I took the berries home and made a gluten free blackberry/almond crisp and I picked some flowers for decoration. Thank you Lord for lovely weather, lovely vistas, and plentiful food. Thank you Lord for the blessings of summer!