Beautiful sunny days of summer

The beautiful sunny days of summer always compare in my mind to the beautiful sunny days of winter. The difference of course is about 40 degrees celsius or more. Some of our brightest bluest winter days are really really cold. Canada does have an unusual climate ranging from highs in the late 30s celsius to lows in the early 30s degrees celsius in my area. The contrast is enormous as we look out on the fresh green lawn today (lots of rain yesterday) and the stacks of snow that we have in mid-winter when the coldest weather can come. 

Yet I always prefer winter to the summer. There is just so much to do outside in the summer that I do not have time for my "work." My mother used to call it a break time when I should be outside in the sun without my glasses. She always felt that my glasses weakened my eyes. I liked to put my glasses on first thing and take them off last thing before going to bed. I simply liked the world better through my glasses. It wasn't wobbly which was how I described my world without glasses. Now as an adult I can actually leave my glasses off on occasion but I do need them to read anything smaller than about three inches. I have worn glasses since I was eighteen months. Up until that point I would not walk without holding on but my mother put the glasses on me and I got up and walked without holding on. That must have been a relief to my parents I expect! It was such a novelty to see a child that young in glasses that once when I lost them playing a neighbour on their way home from the bus spotted the reflection from the sun on my glasses and brought them directly to my house. He didn't even know they were missing. That always rather surprised me when I was told the story as I was only two years of age at that time. 

Yesterday I managed to cultivate most of the flower beds and the garden before the downpour. You could watch Mother Nature swallowing up all that rain as it fell on the garden. Everything is just a little larger today. I just need to finish the cultivating and perhaps that will be the last big cultivation before fall cleanup. There is a steady beat to cultivating as you work your way down a row between plants and then in the open the free wheeling strike of the cultivator on the earth again and again as you work on the soil that has already yielded its goodness into the vegetables already consumed and now part of this summer's history. 

Today maybe I can start to look at the Blake Newsletter missing for the first of July. Most of my readers of that newsletter are American. There are a lot of Blake families in the United States and for the most part any that might be actually related to me are totally unknown by me in terms of the surname Blake. I do know that there are a number of my Knight cousins in the United States although only known by their strong match to me on the Knight areas in our chromosomes. I have endogamy in that family line with Knight marrying Knight and Knight marrying Butt and many of those lines coming together. My Blake line from Hampshire is a small line going back but made up for that in the 19th and 20th centuries. I trace back to a singleton Blake born in 1709 (Thomas Blake son of Thomas Blake and Mary Spring). His father was from a larger family (11 siblings) although some died as children. Their parents John Blake and Elizabeth (unknown) lived at Andover and that John was the son of William Blake and Ann Hellier as far as I am able to ascertain. It fits the rules of establishing a link but I remain ready always for new evidence. I do have very small DNA matches with descendants of the siblings of that William. The helpful part is that William's grandparents were possibly cousins (Richard Blake and Jone Blake). That cousin relationship helps to intensify the Blake line somewhat making it visible far back into time in the DNA matches. 

The sun continues with its beckoning wanting the garden cultivation to continue so that at the next rainstorm missing areas will also be refreshed deep into the soil.