Opening the Circle

Last night we had 3 people over for dinner on our deck and it's the first time that we've tried it in quite a long while.  I've gotten a little deterred from "doing dinner" over the past two years - mostly to do with my mental health I suspect.  Anyway, we had good weather and a huge storm started about 2 hours after the others left.  It's been raining heavily and we're getting evacuation alerts to be ready to leave at any time.  We live on high ground so I'm not the least bit concerned but do think of some folks that I know.  Dinner on the deck went quite well in terms of socially distancing and I didn't have to clean up the house much because I doubted if anyone would come inside.  They didn't.  And the mosquitoes didn't start to drive us crazy until nearly 8:30!  So we opened the circle of guests a tiny bit and I hope to keep doing that as the weeks unfold.  The boys return to school for 2 days next week and we'll see how that plays out.  It was lovely to pick my first bouquet of lupines on Saturday.