A little gratuitous beauty

Farmer lily

Roundtop Mountain’s early-season mini-heat wave is past its prime, if not quite done with and out the door this morning. For that alone I am in a celebratory mood, so it’s a good time to post a photo of a bit of nature’s gratuitous beauty. This cloudy morning the farmer lilies are blooming. Some were still closed up after the night but most were open and ready for their close-up. I could not disappoint them.


Like black raspberries and new fawns, late June is also marked by farmer lilies. They line the roads leading up the mountain as thickly as crowds at a New Year’s Day parade. They are 6-10 blooms deep in the ditches and often run on for the length of a football field. If you can’t count at least 100 blooms while standing in one spot, you must be inside. With the curtains drawn.

It’s not only the farmer lilies that are appearing on the mountain either. Other midsummer blooms, like chicory, are also starting to add some color to the summer green. I haven’t yet seen any brown-eyed susans but they can’t be far from showing up either.

The Canada geese babies now resemble their parents and no longer look like featherless chickens. They still can’t fly, and the parent geese still shepherd them everywhere, but already they look a lot more like adults than goslings.

Fawns are beginning to appear on the mountain, too. They’ve been born for a little while now, but are only just starting to be big enough to accompany mama on her daily rounds. Many are still hidden, curled up during the day while mother grazes on the ski slopes.

Officially, summer has only just begun but here it looks and feels like midsummer. To me, the July 4 holiday has always marked the “middle” of summer—six weeks after Memorial Day (the unofficial start of summer) and just nine weeks before Labor Day (the unofficial end of summer). I suppose that thinking is left over from my school days when Memorial Day and Labor Day pretty much bracketed the end of one year and the start of a new term. So whatever the calendar says, my thinking has its own version of summer.