Category: Garden
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Grass
I'm home and a bit under the weather, although I suspect it is just a combination of trip-fatigue and allergies. There are a couple of blog posts floating around in some part of my brain, but the key to opening them does not seem to be available this particular morning.
Instead we have rain and grass, offering a short respite from ongoing work.
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Garden Progress
Progress in the garden has been slow.
This was mostly due to rain which complicated the coordination of various schedules. But progress is once again being made. Beds have been dug. Plants are going in. Stones are being selected and laid out in pleasing patterns. I am told that the sod will go in next week. Although I have grown accustomed to the smooth expanse of dirt and its promise, I welcome having a yard that looks like a yard once again.
In some ways though the unfinished landscapong has reminded me of my own unfinished work of settling into whatever and whoever I want to be in this stage of my life, although I suspect that process of settling, and growing, that process of becomiing is actually a lifelong process. But then a garden is also constantly evolving as well, and although there may be periods of great upheaval and improvement, there are also constant evolutions of a more subtle nature.
My life at the moment feels to me more like this flower pot. There are the establish plants, and then various blossoms things that have been added here and there with no real plan or thought. Now they all grow together willy nilly, each claiming their own place. I am still trying to find balance between interior and exterior spaces, and I suspect that there really is no balance, at least not in an organized sense, but there is harmony if one allows it to exist, and allows each little bit to flower in its own good time. What I am learning is that it is better to take time when time needs to be taken, rather than to shove things back. Surprsingly to me, acknowledging that need for time is more freeing than hampering, and more efficient-making in its own way.
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Friday Distractions
The backbone of the watering system is in place. Next comes planting.
A small community of plants are waiting at the transfer station (my driveway) looking forward to their relocating to their new homes.
All remains in transition and I am once again struggling to keep on track. It is not that I do not have enough time, there is enough time for what needs to be done, and what isn't done is not truly important. But still I struggle. I am not good at the day to day routine stuff, keeping everything together and neat and orderly; or more exactly I am organized and I can be good at that, but it is a background activity, a support structure as it were for my more free-flying thoughts and inspirations. And I am in free-flying visionary mode right now, filled with ideas and plans and not therefore very efficient at the mundane day to day details. Not that I am actually a detail oriented person by nature. I only do details when they capture my fancy, relate to a specific vision or goal, are a means to an end.
And so, here I am with a plan for the activities over the next few days, and a schedule of what must be done by when, but in the meantime I am easily distracted by other things, and there are piles on the dining table and my desk, which would drive me to distraction except that at the moment I am ignoring them.
Far more important was noticing the sky yesterday late-afternoon/early evening, about 2 hours before sunset. The sky was a deep cerulean blue, lightening and brightening toward the horizon, but still saturated with color. It was a painterly sky, filled with puffs of painterly clouds. Although the play of light highlighted texture and color and the clouds had weight and presence in the air, they also seemed so bouyant and light, ephemeral even. Is it possible to be simultaneiously weighty and ephemeral?. It popped into my head that if you crossed cotton candy with popcorn and let the result float freely in the air like a balloon, this is what you would have. It is not profound image. I apologize for that. I tried to take a picture with my phone from my car. Mistake. I really need to learn more about photography, take more time, pay more attention. The artifact from the car windows, the assorted telephone poles and wires, had more life than the sky behind them. Of course this too could be a metaphor, how sometimes we need to look beyond the everyday clutter of our lives, and see the perfection of the sky that lies just beyond the fringes of our attention. It was one of those moments when reality looked more like a painting than it normally does, one of those moments where art and life coincide, were the real and the ideal align for just a moment, and if we are looking capture our breath and reward us wtih infinite possibilities.
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Out with the Old
The backhoe person is here today and my patchy grass is quicky becoming nothng but a memory. Strange as it may sound, I think the bare ground actually looks better than the scraggly grass. I suppose this is good since scheduling conflicts have delayed the sod until after October 6th. I reserve the right to change my mind if it becomes a sea of mud, however I think at this point even mud is filled with promise.
Not that activity will stop: the sprinkler system goes in this week and after that new trees will appear and the flower beds will start to take shape.
In the meantime it is noisy and the cats are piled up on my desk, making work somewhat difficult. They follow me around whereever ago, happy to have me back, probably also reassured that I am here while strange people are making loud noises around the house. The noise disrupts my chain of thoughts as well, and it is a better day for general busywork than for activities that require focus.
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Plans
I'm late. Apologies. I'm also traveling. Oh well.
Last year I got bookcases. This Fall I am finally landscaping the yard. My intention had been to start in the Spring, but well, Spring didn't work out the way I planned. Lying in bed, looking out my bedroom window at the bare hill and exposed clay however, helped me to stop equivocating about what to do and move forward.
Before:
The view from my bedroom window. So appealing don't you agree?
The view from the windows in the sun room. Also inpsiring. Begs one to sit curl up and stare out the window, doesn't it?
The view from the street, no so bad really, but not great. Lots of bare patches. The planting beds are really jut piles of clay with mulch on top. The plants do not thrive. I have finally accepted the fact that my back is not going to support digging through clay.
Work begins this week, mostly weed-killing, marking, and preperation for the sprinkler system.
These are the plans, the pictures will enlarge if you click on them, although you still may not be able to fully decipher the writing.
Front yard: same layout of beds, expanded slightly and rearranged. The two River Birches will be removed and replaced with other trees.A long bed will run along the length of the side of the house. The bare areas on this plan will probably eventually contain a mixture of daffodils and daylillies along with other plants.
The back of the house (first photo of the bare hill). This promises to be much more interesting. It should also discourage my neighbor from driving across my yard in his truck to deliver mulch to his own gardens.
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A Simple Gift
There is a wild blackberry bush growing in my front yard. It is actually somewhat hidden at this point, located as it is at the corner of the house behind some of the foundation plantings. It won't remain hidden for long as it will grow larger in time and it needs to be moved.
Moving the bush isn't a problem. I am beginning the process of landscaping the side and back yards. I live at the end of the street, at the edge of the woods, and Iike the ideas of mixing blackberries into the more formal landscape, of finding some symbiosis between the wild and the more civilized.
But it strikes me that I hadn't even noticed it was there until it was pointed out to me. I stand mere feet from that bush every day as I unwind the hose, water plants, wind the hose back up again. How could I fail to notice something so different from the surrounding shrubbery? Easily as it turns out. The truth is that I had seen the blackberries: I had noticed the blossoms, different as they are from the adjacent bush and I had even noticed the bright red berries foming. But my mind wasn't attending to what my eyes were telling me. Beyond that brief flash of acknowledgement, that brief passing awareness, I had payed no attention at all. I was too busy counting off the steps to "what next" to pay any attention to what was right in front of me.
How much of life do we see and not see simultaneously? I suspect more than we care to admit. How much of what is really valuable in life do we miss by not being present, wrapped up as we are with tasks, and lists, and schedules, our minds focused on "what next" rather than "enjoy now"? Does striking one more item off our To Do lists really make life more meaningful? Is there some reward for having been busier and done more? Is the meaning of life defined by one large tally sheet in the sky? Increasingly I am not convinced.
A blackberry bush seems so unimportant. And yet it is not. The blackberry bush is a gift. More than a gift, it is an invitation to stop for a moment, take a few steps out of one's way, and enjoy a blackberry or two or three, sweet and warmed by the sun, perhaps to share a blackberry with someone else; it is an invitation to open our eyes to those precious little things that are truly important in life, and to escape for a moment, the tyranny of that large tally sheet that so occupies our minds.
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Peripatetic
Move much and accomplish little. This seems to be my current operating mode. I am upright most of the time. When I am tired I sit. Bed is the worst, but really, don't you think I spent enough time there? Even getting myself to go to sleep seems difficult. I want to keep puttering about, puttering and resting and puttering some more.
It is not very efficient. I can't lift much. I can't go where I want when I want because I haven't been able to drive, but that is changing. Mostly, I can't focus. I don't believe I have been this absent-minded in ages. Perhaps this is some kind of reactionary inter-cellular phenomenon, freedom from excessive stillness breeds excessive puttering.
I think I am calming down now. At least I seem able to string words together into some semblence of thought. The better I have felt physically, the more fragmented and scattered my thoughts have become. I must be feeling better because I am getting particular again, starting to set things to rights around the house, my version of "rights" that is.
Some parts of this process are good. It is good to be taking care of myself, taking care of my space.
I went to the farmer's market with a friend who could drive and schlepp. She even brought one of the chairs around front from the back porch, so I could sit and plant the flowers she so kindly carried for me. Even that, without lifting or bending, was enough work. But the joy experienced for the effort expended is phenomenal. There are no more dried twigs in the planters, stark reminders of my incarceration. Instead there are flowers. And the flowers make me smile. Soon I will sit out on the screened porch, surrounded by flowers and soft breezes. Monday was pollen scrubbing day, although I only did a tiny bit of the scrubbing and none of the heavy lifting. There is still a little scrubbing left, but only the small stuff, the things I can do myself. I can accept that it may take 2 days to accomplish what took half a day last summer, and I suspect that there is a lesson there somewhere, about enjoying the process of one's life. I hope I don't lose that thought along the way.
There, I think my head may be a trifle clearer now. Perhaps a little nesting helps the brain to settle as well.
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An Anniversary
I took a walk today. I didn't go very far, but I got almost to the empty lot about half way down my street. That was actually quite an accomplishment. While I was walking I stopped to take some pictures.
This photo is the only one from my own garden, the first magnolia blossom on my small tree. I had planned to do some landscaping to my back and side yards this spring, and update the front beds, but we know what happened to those plans…
It is a quiet Mother's Day in my neighborhood and I hope my neighbors are spending happy days with their families. We got together yesterday, my step-daughter Miriam, my favorite grandson Owen and I. We had barbecue ad watched a movie. But first we made brownies in a mini-muffin tin, brownies with chocolate peanut butter cups inside them. I won't say "Reeses" because we used the ones from Trader Joe's, and I think they are much better. Those peanut-butter brownie bites were George's favorites, and it was nice to make them and share them because yesterday was the anniversary of George's death, and we all wanted to remember him in some simple way.
It was a good way to remember. We also watched one of the Star-Wars movies, The Clone Wars. Owen hadn't seen it yet, and in George's final years he became quite the Star Wars fan, watching the movies over and over, marveling at the inventiveness of the films. We all thought this was odd because he hated science fiction and fantasy films when he was younger. But I think it was just because I turned the subtitles on and he finally knew what was going on. I think (know) his hearing had been bad long before he was willing to admit it. He enjoyed movies and television so much more when he could read the dialog as he watched the film. Perhaps that explains part of his willingness to go to foreign films.
It was a good way to spend the day for me, with the future but remembering the past. It is true I had been thinking about this weekend, and I didn't really think it would be hard for me in some ways, but it would have been harder if I had not spent time with family. I am no longer actively grieving his passing, but that doesn't mean that I don't mourn his loss. And a part of that process for me has also been figuring out my role: if I still have a role in a family I think of as my own, but I wasn't quite sure if they felt the same. In short what is the role of the stepmother when the father is gone? There is no more Dad and Mardel, just Mardel. Am I family? Am I friend? Am I something in-between or none-of-the-above? It is something George worried about, and I suppose he passed that on to me. Sometims the signals seemed mixed and I am far too prone to over-think.
A Mother's Day bouquet from my two step-children, who I will always love and fret over.
One of the good apects of this housebound time has been that it has allowed me to settle myeslf, to realize that I am ready for life to go forward, to blossom. And even though that long extended goodbye was at times difficult, I am glad I had that time, and those memories to savor. I am ready to be whatever I am now, whoever I am now, and although I am not cutting off past relationships, I would love for them to continue to grow and flower into a new dyanamic, all I can do is be myself and plant what seeds I can, add fertilizer and hope for something to grow. I cannot control its growth. In short I tend to fret too much and I am tired of fretting. I am tired of seeing the world through the eyes of expectation. Instead I hope to learn to see and treasure each tendril, each flower, each encounter, each relationship simply for what it is, enjoy the flowering, savoring and nurturing what can be nurtured and accepting that the rest is outside my control, letting it be.
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Apparently I Missed the Flowers
When we moved to Tennessee I wondered if I would miss gardening. I intentionally bought a house in a PUD, recognizing that I didn't have time and accepted that I would rather be somewhere where someone else worked at keeping up appearances, at least landscaping wise.
Still I wondered. I would ask myself, rather abstractly, if I wanted to buy planters to flank the garage door. I would admire the pretty annuals in the neighbors' yards and gently chide myself about my lack of motivation. And yet I did nothing. My wishes for flowers were nothing but idle fancy, fluff and dreams, nothing concrete.
Until now.
It started with two hanging baskets. I was at Kroger, not thinking about flowers, thinking about a few things I needed at the house before family arrived later that afternoon. Flowers caught me by surprise. I bought two hanging baskets. I set them in the front flower bed by the front bed and did nothing further. I watered them daily, faithfully, tending their promise of beauty to come. But I didn't know what to do with them. My mind was elsewhere.
The day after everyone left, one week after George's death. I saw two large oval planters and I knew they needed to come home with me. They were delivered that same day. For a week they sat: empty. Baby steps.
I started on Memorial Day weekend. Hours were spent wandering through nurseries, looking for plants. Everything is different here. The light is different than it was at my former home. There I was mostly planting in shade; here I have full sun. But the plant selection is different too, even the annuals. It was both fun and overwhelming.
I like the effect so far. I have no idea how they will hold up over the summer, if these plants will play harmoniously together or if one will bully the rest, overwhelming everything and taking over.
Once the planters were filled, I addressed those two lonely hanging baskets. I realized that I was suffering a problem of context. It was not the plants themselves that were the problem, but the potting medium. Two pots and two plant stands later they grace an empty corner of my front walk and my house is taking baby steps toward becoming a home. It no longer looks like the plainest, loneliest house on the street.
Two pots became four. Once I got my hands in the dirt. Once I saw the flowers I couldn't stop. I missed the dirt. I missed the flowers. Four pots have become six, eight. I am still planting. And now it seems that yes, I am home.