Breakfast at the Milkweed Cafe

It has been a very strange time at our house this past week or so. The Universe has somehow been lobbing groundhogs at us. Alive, dead, undead? You decide! Our best guess is that we had a family of at least THREE of them, and now there is perhaps one small one left, who has been excluded (again) from under our front porch, which is apparently the hottest vacation destination for our local groundhog populations.

On this morning, my husband came running in the front door with good news: "Do you want to see some reasons for hope?" he asked. And we went out together and discovered two humungous monarch caterpillars in the milkweed patch. I managed to take a few pictures, and in this one we have both a monarch caterpillar and a red milkweed beetle. Interesting breakfast partners at the Milkweed Cafe!

The soundtrack song for this image is Toni Childs, with House of Hope.