A cool but sunny spring day - what can be better than a walk up the hill overlooking my parents' town? If you listened to the complaints of my kids, anything would have been better than that. But once they were up on the hill, they loved it - just as I knew they would. We went purposefully looking for two kinds of flowers - pulsatilla and carlina acaulis or silver thistle. Both are highly endangered species that grow like weeds in our neck of the woods. Pulsatilla blooms at the moment and paints the hills with delightful purple streaks. The silver thistle won't bloom until August but the last remnants of the year before can still be found.

Fun was had even though we had to walk uphill. The nerve of those parents...