It’s seven a.m. and raining . . .

And gloriously cool. I’m actually wearing light pants and slippers here on the porch. At the cabin, of course. When was the last time I wrote a blog in town?

You can’t remember, can you?

Neither can I. (If I did, I’m sure it was some piece of shameless self-promotion, anyway.) When the cabin sells, I shall have to teach myself to write somewhere else, 

but for now . . .

For now, it is crazy green up here. My `new’ helper (new as in this spring) started a garden up here in the old plot. I am delighted to have the beds I spent so much time on cleaned out and put to use, even minimally. The rain has them flourishing with squash and beans and tomatoes. 

ok. it's a lousy picture. take it from me. flourishing.

A few weeks behind the town garden she’s been helping me with, but then this land has always been a few weeks behind town. In a growing season sense, that is.

In the sense of time and space, it is decades behind. In a good way. Hell, in the best way possible.

Yesterday I showed the little Turtle cabin to my new friend, the blueberry farmer. He’s got a pick your own blueberry patch just over the hill, so to speak. 

amazing blueberry farm on stillhouse lane

He’s thinking about putting a cabin on an old homeplace he has elsewhere in the county. The little cabin is the one we stay in now. The one you’ve heard so much about over the years. Here’s a refresher picture:

Turtle cabin with guard dog

Turtle  cabin with addition of wife.

And speaking of old homeplaces (clever segue, no? at least it would be if I had any Idea where this was going), my friend the blueberry farmer who I hope you will remember as he was just in the last paragraph (come on, people, keep up! It’s not that early), his grandmother actually lived on this property. In the old original log cabin. She and her husband were tenant farmers on this property. It was probably this woman who planted all the daffodil bulbs that still bloom every spring all around the old cabin site.

I knew this property must have been farmed. There were too many unusually flat places with huge piles of rocks near them. I shall have to go back to his place next week and find out more of this story. And pick blueberries, of course.

Chance went with us to pick berries. He’s been going everywhere with us since he became Only Dog . Not just because we love him, although of course we do, or spoil him, although of course we do, but because he has almost never in his life been alone. Never for more than a few minutes since he was found and fostered as a pup. He has just a tiny touch of anxiety and perhaps a few minor behavioral abnormalities. Just a few. Maybe a psychiatric problem or 12.

But he’s been doing amazingly well. Pulled on his big boy fur panties and dogged up, so to speak. See?

Ok, perhaps that wasn’t the best picture choice. He’s a tad depressed by the rain and delayed walk.

chance smells a rat on the walk. literally. a rat lives here.

I just came back from a couple of hours hunting the elusive coral chanterelle on the banks leading down to the creek. Which, by the way, had a lovely voice after yesterday’s rain.

I’ve been worried about `my’ chanterelles since the major Kerrs Creek flood this spring. http://summerhoodisland.blogspot.com/2017/06/saw-my-first.html

I hadn’t seen many chanterelles, and was afraid they’d all been washed into the creek, and some mushroom hunter in Buena Vista was going to be very excited next year.

They did slide pretty far down toward the creek. 

But a lot of them are still around for me to enjoy. 

Maybe I’ll tell whoever buys the place about them. Maybe they won’t care. But maybe 20 or 50 years from now somebody’s going to be walking along that creek bank and recognize these beauties for what they are, collect them, and happen to mention their find to someone in town. Who is going to say, “Oh, yeah, my grandmother used to talk about a crazy lady who ran restaurants and lived in Kerrs Creek and was always finding mushrooms.”

Not such a bad legacy.  I’ll take it.