Can it really be June already? This year is flying by faster than a Italian race car with its gas pedal glued to the floorboard. The poppies (California's state flower) and the beautiful blue lupins are blooming on the hillsides.
Down at Lake Arrowhead, the ducks are doing their thing close to the shore, where they won't get run over by a boat.
My mama, and every older person I knew when I was a child, used to tell me to "make the most of being young because time goes by faster than you can blink." I didn't believe them. Summer lasted forever, then school went on for an eternity until Christmas vacation...time passing by fast? What were they talking about?
Now I know. And, I bet you know, too...don't blink, or it will be November!
When I think of summer, I think of Hollyhocks. They were in all the gardens of my childhood and I made sure that, wherever I lived after I was grown, I had them in my own gardens.
Their wonderful crinkly, delicate petals, so well suited to making hollyhock ballerinas. Or Faeries.
The bees adore them; I think that one on the left is using part of the hollyhock as a dress!
And, perhaps, a hat as well... 
Like Fireweed, which my friend in Alaska calls a 'time keeping' plant because its flowers open from the bottom of the plant at the start of summer and continue on up the plant as summer progresses, the hollyhock, for the most part, does the same. When the last flowers at the very top of the plant have opened, then faded and fallen off, you know that Autumn will soon sweep in on a chill breeze...and hollyhock time won't be back until next summer.
"Then followed that beautiful season ... Summer ... Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Summer afternoon - summer afternoon...the two most beautiful words in the English language ~ Henry James
