A while back, one of the girls scanned in some old family photos.  One of them was my “engagement picture.”  I hadn’t seen it in years and was seriously amused at my choice of hairdo.  I recall that it required half-a-can of Aqua Net hairspray to maintain it in the West Texas Wind. I could not recall what my inspiration had been.

Then, in the middle of the night last night, I was doing a little surfing and happened upon an ancient episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,”  and there she was — clearly my coif’s model — Laura Petrie!  Well, at least I got the hair right. I should have studied her eyebrows more closely.

Today there was a progressive-garden-tea-party-fund-raiser in the nearby historic Gaiety Hill neighborhood. Susan organized this for the organization she founded in memory of George for the benefit of special-needs children, George’s professional passion when he was a pediatrician. I drove Connie and her sister Bonnie, and Elisabeth Walton joined us for some conversation in Susan’s garden.  Elisabeth (on the left) is a local historian and we serve together on the Art & Architecture Committee at St. Paul’s. Some more pictures of Susan’s wonderful garden:       

Roxanne and Karen hold forth, musically speaking, outside Karen and Willy’s garden tea house.

And a couple of whimsies in Irene’s garden:

5:25 a.m.

Waiting for the sun to rise from my upstairs window with Mount Hood in the distance:

5:27 a.m.

At its northernmost point, it peeks through Elizabeth’s sequoia sempervirens, fifty feet high now, from only five when she planted it in 1999:

9:05 p.m.

It slips into the clouds over the western coastal range, again in the far north, after spending this longest day arcing around to the distant south and all the way back.