My Favorite Pictures of the Month - May 2018

By far, my favorite picture during May is the one of my father's grave with a flag in front of it on Memorial Day. (My mother side of the gravestone is on the reverse side - just as they do throughout the entire cemetery.)

There were 5,000 volunteers who placed flags in front of graves at Fort Snelling National Cemetery on Memorial Day weekend. This is the first time in over 30 years that all the gravestones have had a flag in front of them. It was a moving sight.

Although I would much rather have my mom and dad living, it was nice to see them remembered and honored in this way.

I also have enjoyed seeing the flowers blooming at our farm. The picture below is a tulip.

These are bleeding hearts that are under the pine trees in the front yard.

One of the things that somehow survived the fire that happened at our farm on May 5th, was an "I Spy" book. I guess if things are tightly packed together, fire doesn't affect them as much.

Although we didn't keep the book (it smelled of soot and was water- and fire-damaged), I thought it was an interesting image considering that much of what I had to do during May was "spy" or discover things that were salvageable; and look for joy in the new growth that was happening around the farm.

There really wasn't anything that was salvageable that we will be keeping for the long-term, unfortunately. However, we were able to find the name of a Christmas china dish set that I was having trouble finding. The girls and I found enough of a broken section of a plate with the name of the pattern on it. With that, I was able to find the pattern online which made us happy.

When I was walking in the west pasture, I found an unusual yellow feather. Found out that it is from a Northern Flicker (Yellow Shafted). The yellow feathers are found on its tail.

Another image that I captured from the rubble of the fire was part of a newspaper. Interestingly, the word "learning" jumped out from the page. Indeed, there have many things I've been learning about during the past month.

Something that I've never seen before on the new growth of pinecones is a fuzzy top (pictured below). It's not typical of this type of tree...or at least what I've seen in the past. 

So, those were some of my favorite pictures from May. It's kind of a hodge-podge of photos, yet they depict the joys and challenges that we experienced during the first full month of Spring.