Just because I love my garden and pond

Hi everyone! Over the weekend, my husband and I were doing long-overdue weeding of the garden, and I was just struck over how much I love working in the garden, even weeding on a sweaty day. I also love that we have all sorts of animals living on our property: snapping turtles, a family of muskrats, a groundhog we call Mr. Berryman. We also get lots of visitors in our pond. And I decided over the weekend that I would blog about the garden and the pond just because I love it. (The world can take a little joyful Joy, can't it?)

This morning, a rainy day when we're supposed to get thunderstorms all day (which means we can't go to the group playdate we were planning -- such is life in a place where it rains in summer -- since I love to be cozy in my house when it rains, I don't mind), we got this visitor in the pond.

It's hard to see. Is it a great blue heron or a sandhill crane? I'm not sure. Great blue herons, so I've read, have yellow bills and this one definitely has a black bill more like a sandhill crane. But sandhill cranes have red on their heads and when I zoomed on the photo, I couldn't see any red. But no matter the name of the bird, it's beautiful and stately and slow. I gratefully accept the blessing of this visitation! (This same bird, I'm pretty sure, visited us last week too, when I had potatoes to peel for cottage pie, something that often takes, for me, a long time. This visitor stayed slowly stalking the water at the water's edge the entire time it took me to peel and boil the potatoes! That was also a rainy stormy day, and she stayed with me the entire time.)

I love living in the country!