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It was a beautiful summer morning, cool for early July. The early morning sun was warm on my back, but there was a breeze that washed across the parking lot where the farmers’ market had been set up.

I approached a white-haired man sitting next to an array of potted perennials.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” I said to start a conversation.

He looked up.

“Fine as frog’s hair,” he responded with a smile.

“Where did you get that saying? I’ve never heard it before,” I said.

He laughed and said that he didn’t recall where he got it, but that it means super fine, so fine that you can’t even see it.

His name was Don Vandenberg and he was one of the vendors at the newly opened farmers market in downtown Shawano. Gretchen and I were in Shawano to see our grandchildren and help their parents get settled in their new home near Red River. We came into town to buy strawberries at the market.

Don, who with his wife, Adelaide, operates Vandenberg Perennials just north of Shawano, wasn’t finished defining the “frog’s hair” simile for me.

“Would you believe that I could split a frog’s hair five ways?”

I thought for a moment and responded that anyone who could raise beautiful perennials could probably do most anything.

“That’s the wrong answer. You were supposed to say, ‘no,’” Don said, laughing again.

“OK, no.”

“Well you just bring me some and I’ll show you how to do it,” he said.

I laughed with him and picked up his business card. He said that he specializes in iris and has 50 colors of bearded iris. He urged me to stop by and see them, which we will someday.

At dinner that night I asked Allison, 4, whether frogs have hair.

“No,” she said.

“ Are you sure? Let’s go see.”

After dinner we walked the mowed paths through the pine and spruce windbreak behind the house. We didn’t find any frogs, but we watched the sun dip behind the tree line of pines beyond the pasture and alfalfa field. A pair of percheron draft horses, their flanks mottled with gray, grazed so close that we could hear them cropping the short grass. Three black angus lounged in the grass beyond them. A breeze brought the scent of new-mown hay.

“Come on, Grandpa,” Allison said, leading the way back to the house where she and her brother would have a bath and bedtime stories.

Fine as frog’s hair, I said to myself.