Fennel

The long view of the unirrigated fields where we often walk yields a vista of dun colored grass dissected by plowed firebreaks and trails.. but upon closer inspection, there is still a lot of life and color. One plant that seems to require no water is fennel, although it grows close to the stream beds, long dry.

While Dana attempted (fruitlessly, as it turns out) to dig a green, crystallized rock out of the cement dry stream bed with nothing but her bare hands and a rock, I found tiny yellow climbing daisy-like flowers, bright blue cornflowers with sticky, spiky stems, white Queen Anne's Lace and, not twenty feet away, a five point stag leaping out of the bushes next to the creek, and bounding ever so gracefully away up the hill.  It would have been a spectacular blip, if I could move fast enough, but by the time I realized what I was looking at, he was gone….

OilMan and I had an appointment with destiny Heather, the dermatology physician's assistant, who scrutinizes our bodies twice a year for evil invaders--freezing scraping and cutting away anything she finds suspicious (or I find just plain ugly….)
When we got home, Ozzie was waiting for his meager allotment of diet food, and Dana came back with the green rock, which now enjoys a prominent place in the rock garden that was deemed finished a week ago….