Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. In the last week, our local park and the fancy steps near it have been home to two proposals and one tiny wedding reception picnic. I don’t know how yesterday’s proposal went; we came from the same direction the beloved was expected from, so we didn’t have any clue until we got to the top of the steps, where there were signs saying “Proposal in progress. Please wait two minutes” on the ground and on the young man’s back.

2. I started a new book this week and it’s told from the first-person plural point of view. As an English major, I find this a fascinating choice for narration and less than a chapter in, I’m already invested in finding out what else the author has in store for me.

3. We had another mishap making ice cream this evening, where I decided to trust the one recipe I saw online that told me what I wanted to hear about timelines, rather than every other recipe that would have made us wait. I’ve learned from past mishaps, though, and just ladled some non-frozen ice cream into glasses and topped them with whipped cream and chocolate sauce and called them milkshakes instead. Tomorrow we’ll have ice cream.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

Nothing makes you remember how lucky you are than having three friends dealing with health-related crises.

Life isn’t all Skittles and beer here, but we’re doing okay and that’s enough. Today, that’s more than enough.

Vance Gilbert and Ellis Paul cover Susan Werner’s “May I Suggest”

I often neglect to show photos from the garden in the height of summer. It’s overgrown and I spend all my time there watering and picking and weeding and then I get home and think, “I should have taken some photos.”

I have young bean plants and hope to have beans in early October, which is still plenty warm in the mid-Atlantic. I planted about a dozen varieties, so I will be pleasantly surprised by what shows up.

I have a bounty of cherry tomatoes. Marauders of the two- and four-footed varieties have plagued our community garden this summer, so most big tomatoes were picked. (I try to be Zen about it — I don’t need the food I grow. Maybe the people who hop our fence would otherwise go hungry. But it can be frustrating until I remind myself of that fact.) But the cherry tomatoes mostly have survived, and mine have branched out everywhere, including vertically down into my bunching onions.

The cucumber plant continues to be very productive, giving me one every week or so. There are plenty more flowers, so I’d expect productivity to continue through September, at least. (Side note: homemade pickles are delicious.)

I have had a stellar year with my cone flowers. Here you can see the various stages they go through:

Not pictured but also growing: Herbs, potatoes, peppers, zucchini flowers (but never actual zucchini).

I still need to get some seeds in the ground for fall greens. They’ve gone with me to the garden a couple times, but I just haven’t gotten around to planting them, although I’ve now cleared the clover and violets out of where they should go.

I had a laid-back weekend. Friday night we spent time up at the park, reading and enjoying the bats zooming inches over the grass and then soaring high into the air after their prey. We came home to eat supper and I found the Washington Mystics playing on tv. As a Connecticut girl, I’m a big fan of women’s basketball, and D.C.’s and Dallas’ teams put on a good show that went into overtime. We concluded the evening with homemade chocolate chip ice cream.

Yesterday, I did indeed get to sleep in. I also stopped by the local yarn shop just to browse for the first time since February (okay, I may have bought a new set of dpns made out of driftwood and some Soak, because one can always use more). I then headed down to the garden, where I put in a couple hours of weeding, yanking out the vines that had made the jump from the adjacent woods and pulling out some not-yet-budding milkweed (yes, monarchs… but weed is in the name and it grows like it; trust me, there’s still plenty left!) that was overshadowing plants I wanted to produce food for me. I then picked some figs from the tree by the garden and then did some grocery shopping, the combination thereof (grocery shopping itself is small potatoes compared to hauling three full bags all home by myself) I’m pretty sure justified eating as much pizza and ice cream as I wanted, which I did while watching the Chuck Brown Day anniversary concert, which was being livestreamed on YouTube.

Today, I went to the farmers market (no boxes of tomatoes this week, but plenty of other goodies), then had a pleasant brunch with Corey in the bedroom in front of the fan while listening to the Nationals game on the radio. I did a few chores around the house and then head over to Arlington to return the overdue book I had from their library. I celebrated finding my way to the library (Roads in Arlington move like staircases at Hogwarts. It’s best if you just don’t fight the concept.) by getting a cup of tea at a local coffeehouse and then taking a less circuitous route back to D.C. After a stop to water the garden and pick basil for our supper, I hightailed it for the park, where Rudi and I stayed until the sun turned in for the night.

It was a good weekend. How was yours?

I’m not sure if particulates from the Western fires have made their way across the country or what, but the sunset tonight was just incredible.