Soft Opening

This was our first of two Saturday mornings in the TJMS Community Garden before Spring Break. A great turnout included school staff, students, parents, a sibling, and several community members - about twenty eager souls total. Everything on our collective mental list happened:

• turning cover crop, hoeing, planting peas, and transplanting winter- sown lettuces. 

• filling and planting three new round canvas beds, and planting root veggies (beets, parsnips, radishes and carrots).

• light pruning of roses, weeding of flower bed, and planting of blue and gold (school-colored) pansies between the rose bushes.

• initiation of the new Eagle Scout compost bin with layers of green plants, brown leaves, and coffee grounds.

• re-seeding tire ruts from last week’s mulch delivery

Exhaustion tinged with exhilaration best describes the feeling that Reidy, Kaila, and I shared when we finally locked up the little blue shed and dragged ourselves home.

    

Keeping Afloat

My writing streak is broken. I fell asleep on the sofa last evening, one episode into Schitts Creek. 

We’re actually bored with the show, halfway through Season 2. The characters, though delightfully quirky, are not evolving at all, and every episode feels like it is building towards something, but by the end (or the next beginning) they are all back where they started. I’m not sure how much more we can take, but we’ve heard that by Season 3 we will be glad we stuck with it.

I can still do the English 6 Hundred Day Challenge, but I’ve effectively started over today. As far as the Month of Slicing goes, I will do what I did last year and post again later today as penance for missing yesterday (and only send one entry to the Two Teachers Writing site).

As far as I’m concerned, this whole daily writing business is about recapturing the joy I’ve always felt in writing, and staying afloat for as long as I’m in the water. When I fall off the board, I’ll climb back on and start paddling again. My purpose is to connect with my surroundings and feel the joy while I’m here.

Cross Purposes

“The Huchera will line this pathway, “ I said, as I motioned towards my latest floral acquisitions of the season. “I’m not a big fan of lariope. I continued. “It’s okay for arcs and curves, but I wouldn’t want to line a whole bed with it.”

 “Humans walk in straight lines,” he said to me. 

As I puzzled over what he meant by this, he went on to explain that his daily treks to the back corner of the yard to retrieve his bicycle from the shed, and return it there at the end of his rides, entailed too many pathways, twists, and turns. What he wants is a more direct path through the organic lines of my backyard canvas. (Not that he doesn’t appreciate its transformation over the past two decades since he moved here as a bachelor.)

“I don’t mind if you walk your bike through that bed. The creeping juniper can bear some traffic,” I offered.

We briefly resurrected the idea of constructing a combination bike/refuse shed, or lean-to, against the recessed kitchen wall just beyond the mud porch door; a tricky project, we once discovered, because attaching it to the house wall would require submitting plans and pulling a permit, and by code we might even have to relocate the crawl space vent if we close in too much of the structure.

“There is no such thing as a straight line,” I thought to myself as we headed inside to get dinner going.

No Cheaters Here

I just read a poetic post from a Slicer who inadvertently skipped writing on Day 7. Her struggle with whether or not to cheat amused me because blogging platforms don’t allow you to cheat. 

I know. I’ve tried. 

Last year was my first Hundred Day Challenge, and there were about three days when I just couldn’t do it. But the following day I always posted twice, for penance. Besides, there was no way to backdate a post.

Or so I thought.

So far, so good this year. I am only ten days in, but I happened to notice, while searching for the link symbol to use, above, that there are blogger options I did not know about over on the right sideboard, including one to change the date on a post. Just sayin’.

Not that I would ever cheat.

The Morning Grind

This morning I woke up at 6:30am. I was the first one awake in my family, except for the cats meowing pitifully at the basement door. I could hear them as I slunk down the stairs and into the kitchen, but my first priority was to get the coffee going.

“Humpf,” I thought to myself, “I really don’t like being the first one awake.”

It was so much better to wake up to the familiar smell of fresh coffee, waiting for me in the pot. I’ve been spoiled. I married a morning person. Until just this month, I have never been the first one to get the day started.

While the coffee trickled slowly into the pot, I opened the pantry, pulled out the plastic bin of dried cat morsels, and plunked a quarter cup into each cat bowl. Then I opened the basement door for the hungry monsters, and stood back to watch the daily spectacle, like the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain.

”Good morning, Girls!” I chuckled.

With coffee in mug, and mug in hand, I strolled over to the back picture window to enjoy the gold finches on the thistle sock. Meanwhile the mourning doves checked out the surrounding spillage, while a squirrel wrestled with the suet cage on the other side of the backyard.

As I tracked the morning activity of critters outside, the critters inside were just finishing their breakfast. One cat was stretched out by the stairs, licking her paws and cleaning her face, while the other one nuzzled up against my legs with her sweetest good morning hugs.

“If only the cats could let themselves out of the basement and make the first pot of coffee,” I mused.

Savoring the Moment

I smell banana bread! Molly is baking again. This is one of the fringe benefits of her Gap Year, for us. Another one is her role as Will’s executive function coach. 

Virtual learning would not have gone so well for Will, or for me, if we hadn’t had Molly around this year helping out. She set up a Homework white board checkpoint to help him keep track of assignments and due dates. At the end of each school day, she checks in with him and makes him verbalize a “plan” for the rest of the day. If he’s stuck with Math, he goes to his dad. But otherwise, Molly is guiding him towards more independence before making her exit next year.

I’ve recently begun to realize how much I am going to miss my firstborn when she heads off to Richmond next year for college. VCU was her one and only choice, her one and only application and acceptance, and she is still happy with this choice one year-of-deferment later. She plans to study Political Science with a concentration in Civil Rights. 

One corner of Molly’s bedroom already contains a small pile of “must haves” for her dorm room, as noted by friends who began their college journeys this year: a heating pad for cramps, a small bedside rug so as not to feel the cold floor with bare feet first thing in the morning, slippers and a house coat for middle of the night alarms, and so on. I notice her sneaking extra face care products into the Amazon cart, recently, as she begins to stock up. 

Meanwhile, one corner of my heart is starting to sag as I consider her departure from our daily lives. But for right now I will just savor the aroma of banana bread, fresh from the oven, that draws us all into the kitchen together.

Weekend Lament

Weekends fly by. That is a fact of life for people who work Monday to Friday. 

The only time in my life that I did not welcome weekends was my first year of college when I was terrified of going out to parties with my hall mates. Parties, at that time, meant fraternity parties. Or sorority rush, later in the year. I never felt comfortable tagging along. I wasn’t a beer drinker then, and I’m not much of one now. I preferred squirreling away at Alderman Library, going for walks, or hiding out at my brother’s 14th Street apartment while he cooked dinner for the two of us. No Friday Night Lights for this Wahoo!

Fast forward to my Toronto years, when I spent weekends singing in my housemate’s church choir, where she directed both human and organ pipes. Or attending my other housemate’s (and boyfriend’s) evening vespers, where they sang as paid leads, alto and baritone. In later years I joined UT’s Hart House Choir, and weekends entailed Saturday morning workshops, or sessions with my roommates helping me work out my vocal parts at the harpsichord-in-residence, as I prepared for weeknight practices. Those weekends were full and fleeting. 

Weekends now involve planning and preparing for Spring gardening. Hours spent outside in the late winter sun feel like mere moments, though magic ones. Then suddenly Sunday evening lands all over again.