putting down roots

Our backyard plum tree is laden again with fruit. Every day, it's a race against the squirrels to pick the newly-ripe plums before those rat bastards help themselves.


I've been mashing them (plums, that is) with bananas for Kai, but he actually prefers to bite into them whole. Problem is, like Ramona the Pest with her apples, he likes to take just one bite of each. That's his hand sneaking into the picture above to help himself.


Speaking of trees, we have wanted a tree for our front yard for years, and this spring we finally planted a dogwood. Like so many other things in our lives (including, you could even say, our old house itself), we got it secondhand, from our neighbors, who are in the midst of a super-deluxe backyard landscaping project. They rejected this specimen because it has a couple of leafless branches, but we're okay with that. So now, between our preowned dogwood and the redbud I got for my birthday, we have almost doubled the tree population on our property, a very happy thing.