Red Sky At Morning

We're back.
In the meantime, I've planned a garden expansion, ordered seeds, and corralled a pal into starting seedlings for his garden and ours while I was away. Seeds from England, seeds from California, seeds from China, seeds from Vermont.
John was a gardener way back in the day, when he should have been stealing hubcaps, fooling with cars and scoping out the babes. Instead, he was weeding his tomato patch and fretting about the lack of rain.
Now that he is an overworked father of Many Young Children, we decided that he needed to return to his roots. With nothing more than the knowledge that I'd be home soon, he goaded himself into creating a marvelous al fresco greenhouse in his basement, which he proceeded to fill with tubs of seeds and dirt and lights.
When I arrived back in the US, I took a week to unpack and dispel the lingering effects of jet lag and then, bearing a celebratory bottle of bubbly, headed over to inspect the progress. The cheerful jungle in the basement was greatly reassuring. And now we are waiting for the endless rain to end and the air to warm up a smidge and the real beginning to begin....