Goodbye, July
Sad, happy, bittersweet...a month of intense emotions
I have started writing this on the last day of July…let’s see when it actually get’s published…EDIT - It’s the 3rd of August, not too bad!
A warning: This post contains sad news of the death of one of our beloved pets.
It’s been an eventful month. July always is a busy one, especially with a child still at primary school: The sports day, the play, the assemblies, the things to remember for trips, camp, when non-uniform day is etc. and even more so when your child is in year 6, there seems to be extra to remember with all of the leavers activities.
This was the last year for all of that though as my littlest moves up to secondary school in September, so it’s been a bittersweet month knowing that we have done various activities for the last time. I certainly won’t miss the mums race at sports day but I have a feeling that I may actually miss the school run just a little, especially as I work from home on my own quite a bit.
Before I talk about anything else though, it has also been a sad time recently. Our sweet Bailey was run over in the middle of the month. It was awful. He was missing at breakfast time which was unlike him and after a hunt around I found him in the undergrowth under a tree at the side of our drive. He was in a bad way and with the help of my sister-in-law who is a veterinary nurse and thankfully lives next door, we rushed him to the animal hospital. She was amazing, ringing ahead to get him taken straight through for painkillers and was able to help explain everything. In the end there was nothing we could do. He wasn’t an able bodied cat anyway and the extent of his injuries was too much. The vets couldn’t get a vein for any IVs and we had to let him go.
We got him alongside his bonded best mates from a rescue last October and in the short time we had him he spent most of it trying to be as close as possible to either us or Cosmo and Comet…we joked that if he could have he’d probably have merged right into us!
He had two good front legs, one back leg that was locked at the joint and another that was a stump. We don’t know how he came to be like that but he would probably have not found his way out of the rescue for a long, long time if he hadn’t sweet talked the kids into persuading Mark and I to take him as well. We went to the rescue for two cats and came home with three…He knew what he was doing when he sat on my daughter’s lap and smiled up at her.
We lost our first family cat (beautiful Oscar who’s rags to riches story I will tell you one day) to a hit and run last summer, and to break the children’s hearts and tell them that it had happened again on our quiet road was the absolute worst of it all. They were devastated.
We live at the bottom of a long drive and the road along the top is so quiet…last weekend, a weekend in the summer holidays in a tourist area no less, my daughter and I walked her pony out a mile down the road and back and were passed three times by vehicles, one of which was the same one twice. That’s how quiet it is! So to lose two cats up there in a short space of time is hard to understand really.
We all hugely miss the cuddles and the ‘shoop bop’ sound Bailey’s dodgy legs made when he walked across our floor. So long sweet Bailey Boo, I hope you had your best 10 months being loved entirely by us all.
Creatively it’s been intense too! I have been working on a kids book about flowers which has been a really lovely project basically painting flowers, insects and animals. It really couldn’t have been more up my street to be honest! But it took a LOT longer than I expected and I had to pull some very late nights to get it finished.
While I worked on that I have had to suppress my urges to paint the other things I have bubbling through my head too. It’s a funny thing when work and life get like that. Although I have been painting, painting, painting like mad I feel like I have several creative itches that I have yet to find the time to scratch.
The work taking up my time is also creative work but every so often when I am doing my bookkeeping, or spending time making shop listings or other admin tasks I am reminded how very lucky I am that for much of the time I get to push paint around for a living.
I am hoping now that I will have a little bit of time this summer to get these ideas down. I am also going to be working on a new website and rebrand for my art shop, so some nice creative things to keep me ticking over while the kids are off school and the sun is shining!
And what else has been happening around here?
It has felt like the driest hottest month but looking back we actually had some rain at the start of the month. As you can see, Bluie made the most of it having been denied her preferred hippo state for some time!
The hawkbit flowers in the bottom field were beautiful too, a big carpet of yellow and the insects were loving it. So many bees! And the start of the chirruping from the crickets and grasshoppers too.
The trefoils brought more yellow at the start of the month, another bee favourite but in the recent heat they, like many of the other colourful wildflowers of June, have gone over to seed…yarrow is flowering now though and thistles, buddleia, chamomile and knapweed are bringing all important nectar for the insects. Some umbels of cow parsley are hanging on in there while much of it has gone to seed. It feels early but I guess when the plants are stressed then going to seed is the only option.
The colours of the hedgerows are looking very late summer too, ferns yellowing, brackens reddening and grasses browning. Coupled with the colours of the grasshoppers and red soldier beetles it’s actually quite a lovely colour palette!
Though the days have been hot and dry, in the mornings there has been a heavy dew which the butterflies and moths have been enjoying. There’s so many spider webs in the grasses of the fields and I love how it highlights them, going some way to confirm just how many creatures call these fields home.
Our fields have browned where the grass is short and while there isn’t a huge amount of goodness in it at the moment, the collected dew seems to percolate a little to the ground. Down near the earth there is still green grass where the horses have yet to be allowed to guzzle it and we’re not having to feed hay like I have heard some horse owners are…not what you want to have to do until winter when the ground turns to mud, really!
The sea has been glorious recently! Mark and have been stealing away on a lunch time to eat our sarnies on the beach and have a cool off. How lucky we are to be able to have this treat. It is incredibly clear and has been so flat.
In the height of the heatwave, friends and I took our children to the beach after school which is also very fun. On one occasion my son found some tiny hermit crabs and then we realised that there were loads of them in the shallows! A hermit crab bloom, is there such a thing? There certainly seemed to be on Carne beach that day!
I’ve found lots of feathers this month…the most unusual of which are from a woodpecker, a tawny owl and several pheasant feathers too. I also heard the screeching of a barn owl at night and spotted a gang of long tailed tits (my FAVOURITES!) pass through. I see them most years but only briefly, flitting between bushes or along hedgerows and then they are gone again to who knows where…I’ve seen a jay wheeling around the valley while out on walks. One day I will find one those blue feathers…one day…
Talking of flying things I’ve seen so many emperor dragonflies, so hard to photograph but this picture is one that my son found (dead) last year. He still has it in his treasure chest in his bedroom. You may have seen me talking about wishing to set a moth trap in notes too, I have yet to get around to this but we did have this very beautiful magpie moth come and visit inside the house which has made me want to set up a trap even more so now!
One of our cats, Cosmo managed to find a little pheasant chick and bring it to the garden. I chased him off and scooped it up and it appeared to be totally fine. Though I had no idea where he had found it or where to put it to give it the best chance of survival. I didn’t want to leave it out just anywhere and my mum almost had herself a new pet when I took it to her for safety away from my cats, but another family member was able to take it to go in with her broody hens and other chicks. We gave it the best chance given the circumstances but sadly it didn’t make it.
Garden wise everything has been suffering in the heat. My dahlia flowers are small and few and far between so far and the agapanthus is going over so much faster than usual. My veggies are a disaster this year too! Lack of time hasn’t helped me this year at all…I think I will be autumn sowing as much as possible this year and try to get a head start for next…
Bindweed is slowly taking over one corner of my garden. It’s flowers are actually quite beautiful but those twisting vines are unforgiving and a nightmare to banish since they can regrow from even the tiniest little bit of root that gets left in the soil. I have spotted a field bindweed alongside the roads too which I have never seen before. It has much smaller flowers that are slightly pink. I wonder if it’s as much of a menace?
This week we have been away for a few days for a family member’s birthday, staying in Kilmington in East Devon. I was surprised how much browner the fields are there. Ours are brown but theirs are even more parched. I watched a horse roll and the dust cloud it kicked up was HUGE!
On our way home we took a detour via Lyme Regis for my son who has been studying Mary Anning at school and went to look for some fossils. We were woefully unprepared (as we were 7 years ago when we last went!) and didn’t have any rock hammers with us but it was fun spotting the ammonites in the larger rocks and finding remnants of fossilised shells. My favourite though was seeing the fossilised prints of vegetation on rocks, shadows of grass and what appeared to be seaweed and maybe twigs and fallen leaves from billions of years ago. Almost like cyanotype prints on the surface of the rock but in grey. Beautiful traces from an unfathomable amount of time ago.
Lastly, I’ve noticed that apples are forming well on the apple trees and this morning, unbelievably I ate blackberries…in JULY. They were as tart and sour as you would expect from berries that have been starved of water for weeks and weeks! I’m hoping they plump and sweeten up for autumn because picking loads and storing them for the treat of winter crumbles is one of the highlights of my year!
I hope August is good to us all…more sun for summer fun but also a little bit more rain really wouldn’t go amiss.
Until next time,
Lee
P.S: I’ll leave you with this sad fossil face that my son spotted on Lyme Regis beach!
Amazing photos, my favourite is the one with the dew, those water droplets look so incredible! x